Our 2015 Global CIO Survey found that CIOs are shifting their IT departments towards an ‘internal service provider’ model in response to the growing challenges posed by Shadow IT. This desire to reshape IT functions to more closely reflect the business needs was identified in last year’s survey. This year, we sought to establish IT departments’ progress along this transformation journey.
Accordingly, we looked at the balance between technology management and service portfolio delivery, as well as their reliance on external service providers. Responses from CIOs overall suggest a circa 50:50 balance between technology management and the delivery of a portfolio of services, as nearly half of CIOs report that at least 30% of their IT is provided by external service providers, including cloud. These findings tend to indicate that we are approaching a tipping point in the transformation of IT departments worldwide.
The strategic CIO
The shift to services is in line with the changing role of the CIO. Currently, IT leaders are spending almost half of their time (42%) on activities consistent with developing and delivering the internal service provider model; that is, ‘engaging with line of business’ and ‘scoping and provisioning new IT services’.
In our inaugural survey in 2013, 73% of CIOs expressed a desire to take on a more strategic role. And despite some progress being made in two years, the transformation remains understandably slow given the scale of the task. Generally though, CIOs are freeing themselves from the day-to-day operational tasks, with 38% now spending at least 50% of their time on strategic activities.
Slowly but surely
Clearly, the transformation of the IT department we identified in last year’s survey is gaining momentum, with CIOs increasingly focused on delivering service portfolios that directly respond to the needs of line-of-business executives. The role of this emerging, services-defined IT department is to offer the choice of services their organisation needs – whether those services are built and operated internally, come from managed service partners, or are consumed from the cloud.
We’ve put the key findings of our survey into an easy-to-read infographic. Check out the results below:
Click here to download the full report of the 2015 survey findings.
The stats:
- 90% of global CIOs are bypassed on IT spending by line of business managers at least occasionally
- 66% of CIOs hold the balance of power over IT decisions
- 42% of CIOs’ time is devoted to ‘engaging with line of business’ and ‘scoping and provisioning new IT services’
- 47% of CIOs say at least 30% of their IT is provided or managed by external service providers, including cloud
- SMAC technologies ranked in terms of importance: social (37%), cloud (47%), mobile (62%), analytics (63%)
- CIOs consider the main benefits of implementing business intelligence to be real-time information (48%) and well-defined business metrics (48%)
- The main barriers to implementing business intelligence are lack of budget (48%) and lack of time (40%)
- 18% of organisations have adopted software defined technologies (SDx), compared to 9% in 2014
