New Generation of Technology Will Rely on Analytics, Study Shows

A new era of information technology is emerging where analytics and business intelligence is coming out on top, and security is keeping IT leaders up at night.

That’s according to the Society for Information Management’s (SIM) 35^th annual SIM IT Trends Study, a survey of more than 1,000 IT leaders, including 451 chief information officers from 717 unique organizations. The companies average $5.6 billion in annual revenues, representing approximately 25 percent of the U.S. economy’s Gross Domestic Product.

A new era of information technology is emerging where analytics and business intelligence is coming out on top, and security is keeping IT leaders up at night.

That’s according to the Society for Information Management’s (SIM) 35^th annual SIM IT Trends Study, a survey of more than 1,000 IT leaders, including 451 chief information officers from 717 unique organizations. The companies average $5.6 billion in annual revenues, representing approximately 25 percent of the U.S. economy’s Gross Domestic Product.

The SIM IT Trends Study’s lead researcher says, based on his findings, there hasn’t been such an important change in IT since the dot-com boom.

“We are in a time of profound change for business, technology and IT leadership,” said Leon Kappelman, Ph.D., Professor at the University of North Texas and SIM’s lead researcher and Professor of Information Systems at the University of North Texas. “Results show the focus of IT organizations and their leaders is changing, with a new emphasis on business value, strategy, innovation and speed.”

In the study, participants were asked to select three of their “organization’s largest/most significant current or near-future IT investments” from a list of 47 technologies. Analytics and business intelligence were chosen both as the No. 1 most important technology and as the No. 1 largest IT investment in the organization.

Coming in second was enterprise resource planning, followed by software development and customer relationship management.

The personally most worrisome technologies, however, were also measured. In this category, security and cyber security moved up from second to first, and were selected by more than 31 percent of the respondents. The study also reveals that curbing cyber security concerns, on average, is only the seventh largest IT investment for the organization.

But that may be changing. Kappelman says with the new focus of IT also comes a new role for the CIO. More than 55 percent of the nearly 500 CIOs who responded said they are part of the top management team that makes strategic business decisions, shattering the notion of a former disconnect between IT and business leaders.

The value of the CIO is also reflected in the position’s tenure. The SIM study reveals that the CIOs who responded to this year’s study reported longer tenure than any year in the last nine years, except for 2012.

It’s great to see that the true value of IT and the CIO is finally being recognized by the C-suite, with the power of moving companies toward digital capabilities as the new hallmark of business operations.