I recently read the report from the 2011 IBM Global CIO Study, the result of “face-to-face conversations with more than 3,000 chief information officers worldwide.”
Frankly, it read a little more like an IBM sales brochure than an objective research report — kind of light on actual data. But I did find one semi-quantitative diagram to be particularly intriguing:
In a study last year, IBM asked CEOs to rank the impact of external forces on their organizations. The above diagram compares those rankings with how CIOs ordered the same list — previously in 2009 and now in 2011.
A few observations:
- If the CEO considers technological factors to be so important, the CIO isn’t the only executive who needs to be addressing this — the CMO needs to have a handle on technological factors in his or her domain as well.
- It’s interesting that CEOs rank technological factors higher than CIOs over the past few years. I guess I would have expected the CIO to be more attuned to those forces — and therefore rank them higher (or at least as high as the CEO does).
- Regulatory concerns as a top external force on the CIO’s mind makes a lot of sense to me — and dovetails with my belief that the IT organization should retain control of regulatory governance as a subset of technology management.
What do you think?
