Organizations are focusing investments on enabling business process innovation and managing IT infrastructure more efficiently, according to IDG Enterprise’s CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities 2016.
Results from more than 200 tech leaders show that technology budgets continue to grow for half of the organizations, demonstrating that technology continues to be an area that can enhance business strategy. Budgets are being spread across multiple technologies, with the largest number of organizations increasing spending on BI and analytics, security applications, predictive analytics, SaaS/cloud apps and mobile enterprise apps. These technologies tie closely into overall organizational goals of innovation and efficient infrastructure.
With applications and innovation in the cue for 2016, it is not surprising that half of enterprise organizations — those with more than 1,000 employees — have either begun using DevOps principals or are planning to. Providing more control and flexibility to the deployment of applications, enterprises are focusing on Waterfall, agile development and interactive/incremental development methodologies. And with security a hot-button topic across all technologies, the research shows that security concerns are addressed upfront within the planning and building stages.
“Technology is a game-changer in the era of digital business and technology leaders need to constantly keep up-to-date with new solutions that can help their business advance,” said Adam Dennison, SVP/publisher, CIO. “With the growing number of solutions being developed each year, the CIO Tech Poll provides great insight for tech vendors to understand the implementation stages for technology and budget allocations so that they can align conversations with tech decision-makers.”
Tech leaders shared their focus on specific technology initiatives across more than a dozen areas. Internet of Things (43%), Windows 10 deployment (38%), predictive analytics (37%), BI and analytics (cloud-based – 37%), and software-defined networking (SDN – 34%) are the top areas being actively researched. As you move further along in the technology life cycle, data management (26%) and business continuity and disaster recovery (23%) are the leading areas being upgraded or refined.
About CIO Tech Poll: The poll was conducted in the fall of 2015 through the CIO LinkedIn Forum, CIO newsletters and email to CIO customers. Results are based on 213 respondents who indicated they are the top IT executive at their organization or business unit. The margin of error on a sample size of 208 is +/- 6.7%.
