The chief information officer’s hold on technology spending reins has loosened once again; while overall technology spending is up, A/NZ CIOs expect their own budgets to fall...
Delegates attending Gartner’s annual symposium, being held on Queensland’s Gold Coast this week have heard that while overall IT spending will rise 4.1 percent to $A78.7 billion in Australia, and 2.9 percent to $NZ11.6 billion in New Zealand next year, CIOs are predicting their budgets will fall by 0.2 percent on average.
Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research, said this represented a dramatic shift in IT spending power toward the business units which were closer to customers.
It’s a trend not lost on IT vendors. Gartner said 50 percent of IT vendors now sell to the business rather than IT departments.
Gartner claimed that 38 percent of all IT spending was now taking place outside of IT shops – forecasting this would rise to more than 50 percent by 2017.
According to Sondergaard, “Digital start-ups sit inside your own organisation, in your marketing department, in HR, in logistics and in sales. Your business units are acting as technology start-ups. Australia and New Zealand are increasingly known for creative and design expertise, with leading global vendors looking here to make acquisitions. You need to tap into this in your organisation and make it a competitive advantage.”
Not surprisingly a survey of 161 A/NZ CIOs found 79 percent of them willing to acknowledge that they needed to change their leadership style in the next three years. Gartner has recommended they flip their focus from legacy to a “digital first” approach.
There will be lean pickings for investment though with 25 percent of A/NZ CIOs predicting a budget cut in 2015. On average A/NZ IT budgets are expected to shrink 0.2 percent this year. That compares to a one percent predicted growth among global CIOs, and three percent across Asia Pacific.
And there is a lot to be done with those shrinking budgets. The five top priorities identified by A/NZ CIOs for 2015 are business intelligence and analytics; cloud; mobile; infrastructure; and ERP.
Local CIOs are pretty much in lockstep with their global peers on most of those priorities – where they are at odds is regarding their enthusiasm for cutting-edge technologies such as smart machines, robotics and 3D printing where they are markedly less interested than overseas CIOs.
