Friday, September 11, 2009

IBM Study: Business Intelligence and Analytics are Top Priorities for CIOs

An IBM global study of 2,500 CIOs released yesterday indicates that business intelligence and analytics top the list of their priorities. Eighty-three percent of CIOs surveyed will use analytics to gain competitive advantage and improve business decision-making.
Other high priorities include data reliability, security, risk management, compliance, reducing energy costs, building a strongly centralized infrastructure, and implementing completely standardized, low-cost business processes. Technologies that the CIOs listed to help them achieve these goals include virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and cloud computing.
The study also documents that CIOs are playing an increasingly strategic role as visionary leaders and as drivers of innovation and financial growth, and spending less time on infrastructure and operations management.
“Clearly the role of the CIO is changing dramatically,” said Pat Toole, IBM’s CIO. “On the one hand they are trying to standardize routine processes and simplify their existing IT infrastructure to reduce costs, hence their growing interest in technologies such as cloud computing. On the other hand, given the central role that today’s CIO performs in driving new business models, whether it’s a smart grid system, an intelligent transport system, or a transparent food supply chain, it’s not surprising that the amount of time they are now spending on driving new kinds of growth for their companies is growing considerably.”
Two of the quickest ways to satisfy current CIO needs for driving revenue growth and profitability, and improving business insight and performanceare through SaaS business intelligence (BI) and data visualization. SaaS BI companies such as Birst can provide actionable insights into large amounts of data within days rather than months or years with traditional on-premises BI solutions. Similarly, dashboard mashup products such as mashmatrix can draw and display data from any web-facing source, and can be used to create personalized dashboards for data visualization within minutes. SaaS BI and data visualization solutions are also a fraction of the cost of on-premises solutions.
The survey underscores the transitional time we live in: the roles and priorities of CIOs have changed, while inexpensive and flexible cloud-computing solutions are supporting their business needs with new technology.
Do the survey results reflect the current priorities of your organization?

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