The Gartner CIO Leadership Forum came to town recently, and it produced some fascinating results on what executives are looking for from their IT investments.
For instance, as the chart below shows, the motivation for investment is primarily to promote innovation and collaboration. Actually achieving results comes way down the chart. Whether this is because proving ROI is too hard is not mentioned.
The event also revealed that the most pressing demand for enterprise technology is to create new ways of doing things, or indeed new things to do. Whilst that’s an interesting finding, it does rather undersell the power of enterprise social media to help the enterprise do things better, or to discover things they should stop doing. It’s especially odd when many organisations are struggling to provide budgets to do new things, so one would have thought doing what they already did better would be a more pressing concern.
It is interesting to see the point of view of the executives. We are on the other part and what they really want to achieve is not very transparent because of several layers that separate us from them. The information is often distorted once it arrives on bottom departments.