Mobile technologies ranked second among CIOs’ top 10 technology priorities for 2013. The first priority was analytics and business intelligence solutions, according to the latest Gartner executive program survey.
The survey shows that CIOs’ agendas are dominated by digital technologies, and CIOs see these technologies as disrupting business fundamentally over the next ten years. Gartner noted that 70% of CIOs cited mobile technologies would be the most disruptive, followed by big data/analytics at 55%, social media at 54% and public cloud at 51%. Each of these technologies present real challenges by themselves, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination rather than in isolation.
Gartner’s report, conducted worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2012 and including 2,053 CIOs,  showed that digital technologies—including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud—have reached a tipping point with business executives over the last 18 months.
Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, said that digital technologies can provide a platform to achieve results but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value. McDonald stated that CIOs need new agendas that incorporate hunting for digital innovations and opportunities, and harvesting value from products, services and operations.
The survey shows that IT budgets have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bust of 2002. For 2013, IT budgets are projected to be slightly down with a weighted global average decline of 0.5%.
While topping CIOs’ list of priorities, business intelligence (BI) and analytics still need to be scaled up to support the robust growth in data sources. Gartner outlined three key predictions for BI teams to consider when planning for the future:
- By 2015, 65% of packaged analytic applications with advanced analytics will come embedded with Hadoop;
- By 2016, 70% of leading BI vendors will have incorporated natural-language and spoken-word capabilities;
- By 2015, more than 30% of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data.
