ORLANDO — Chief information officers see Google and Amazon being the most influential in enterprise innovation over the next decade with Apple, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and a bevy of other core vendors looking like last decade’s news.
And notably the most influential technology company in the enterprise is dubbed “other.” Those takeaways on innovation were outlined in a Gartner presentation on the CIO agenda for 2014 by analyst Dave Aron. The 2014 outlook was based on a 2013 CIO survey.
Aron said that businesses need to “move from a handful of vendors to crowdsourcing and managing more of them.” The reality is that today’s vendors can’t keep up with digitization, said Aron. That point was also noted earlier in the day by Gartner research chief Peter Sondergaard.
This slide highlights the IT sourcing landscape and how it’s shifting.
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Perhaps the most notable point in that slide is that enterprises don’t see their core vendors being all that innovative in the years to come. These CIOs see innovation coming, but from providers that may be unknown today.
Aron’s agenda for CIOs portrayed IT departments as in flux. Budgets are shifting to other business line leaders, satisfaction is solid with 10 percent very satisfied with IT, 39 percent somewhat satisfied and 21 percent slightly satisfied. Only 7 percent was neutral on IT. In other words, if the IT department had a net promoter score it wouldn’t look half bad.
The biggest hurdle for CIOs in 2014 is enabling companies to become digital businesses. And it’s likely that this chore will fall to CIOs and business leaders. Why? Less than 10 percent of companies have a chief digital officer or strategist — for now.
“We need leadership that can create the agility to capture the business moments,” said Aron. Aron reiterated that CIO influence will ebb and flow and that digital officers will peak and then decline. “The CIO needs to be the digital story teller,” he said.
As for technologies, the 2014 new spending priorities are the usual suspects: Cloud, analytics, mobile, digital marketing and infrastructure.
The infrastructure and data center investment for 2014 reveal that companies are going to be two-speed hybrids using their own gear as well as the public cloud. Think of the approach as agile on one side with more of a methodical approach on the other. One key question: How can CIOs be fast enough without making a mess?
Gartner’s CIO survey revealed a quarter have invested in the public cloud mostly for software as a service, but platform as a service and infrastructure as a service occupy sizeable chunks. Fifty four percent of CIOs cited agility as the primary reason for public cloud investments with 14 percent citing innovation and 6 percent saying cost drove the spending.
Nevertheless, few see a day anytime soon when half their business will run on the cloud.
Date: October 7, 2013