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2003 -- a CIO's guide

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Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Jan 2003 12:57 GMT

The next year will be a tough one for the chief information officer (CIO), or the IT manager as he or she used to be known. You knew that already, but you probably didn't know exactly how tough or in what ways.

According to analyst firm Gartner Group, IT expenditure is expected to remain flat, or go up very slightly during 2003, with most CIOs having the same amount of money to spend this year as last year.

Those in the UK can take some comfort from the fact that their situation is a little better than elsewhere. "The UK is among the least weak of the IT economies," says John Mahoney, vice president and research director at Gartner.

Unfortunately, CIOs everywhere will be expected to continue doing more with that money. And, while resources like processing power, storage and network bandwidth are continuing to get cheaper, the job is made more complicated by the installed base of working (or mostly working) IT that all CIOs have to work with .

To make the whole thing more concrete, Gartner has produced a list of ten things that CIOs should be trying to get done this year. It is an impressive set of tasks, especially as they come on top of just "doing the job", dealing with the everyday issues and crises that crop up.

During 2002, according to Gartner, CIOs, have been concerned with three things:

Vigorously manage costs
Focus on the core business and work with partners for the rest, and
Make sure there is a bit of resource "spare" for future planning

But in 2003, these concerns have to change. From now, they will have to:

Reduce IT costs
Demonstrate the business value of technology
Provide leadership and guidance to the board

The big difference here is that, as the downturn bites, IT has to justify itself alongside other departments. If the CIO can't justify his or her place in the business, that place will be eroded.

Of course, the best way to do this, is to do the job well, so even though they have to keep an eye on their colleague's perceptions of them, CIOs have to give most of their attention to actually doing the job. This means making tactical and strategic decisions, fixing things and making long term plans.

Let's look at some of the headlines in Gartner's suggestions. Before we do so, let's remind ourselves of some of the things that are too obvious to mention. The following are simply part of the IT atmosphere.

Security Every CIO has to be continually aware of this and that will not change. There will still be plenty of security scares on widely used products (both opensource and proprietary), and virus attacks.

Wireless and mobility Every business will look more and more at providing mobile resources to its employees. If nothing else, this is because they are likely to be making moves in that direction if nothing is provided. Again, every CIO should have some projects in this area.

Open source versus Microsoft You know the arguments. You are already making the decisions whether to direct resources to licence fees, support or development. This will continue to be an issue for you.

Read on for the interesting stuff.

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