ANZ CIOs leading businesses into digital transformation: Gartner

A global CIO survey by Gartner has indicated that in order for enterprises to build a digital business model, they need to work on improving their leadership, talent, and delivery platforms.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2015, Gartner vice president Graham Waller revealed that based on findings of the Gartner report, Building the Digital Platform: The 2016 CIO Agenda, there are still business opportunities for CIOs to address.

He noted that traditional business models no longer suffice, and that businesses need to shift into different platforms as it will allow them to be more flexible when it comes to sharing resources internally and externally.

"A lot of traditional thinking saw our businesses as systems that were fairly rigid black boxes with employees inside and everyone else outside, and with functions operating in silos," he said.

"The platform thinking, in contrast, is a much more horizontal view. It's a way we could rapidly convene resources to create new value in a much more flexible way, both inside and outside of the enterprise, to serve customers in new ways, to create new business models, and to take up new opportunities."

Reflective of Waller's view, the 2016 CIO survey revealed that within the leadership platform, 52 percent of Australian and New Zealand CIOs consider themselves as leaders of digital transformation, compared with 39 percent of CIOs globally. 40 percent of ANZ CIOs also believe they're leading innovation within their organisation versus just 34 percent of CIOs globally.

Waller said in order to further boost the leadership position of CIOs within businesses, they need to become trusted allies of CEOs. Currently, only 29 percent of ANZ CIOs are considered a trusted ally, up from 19 percent in 2014. According to Gartner, half are still considered as partners within the CIO-CEO relationship.

Waller also indicated that businesses still need to work on evolving their talent platform, with the Gartner survey indicating that skills are the biggest barrier to CIO success globally. But for those in ANZ, 19 percent said they were being held back by funding.

CIOs globally and in ANZ identified that the biggest talent gap was information and analytics skills, and the two next biggest skills gaps in ANZ was project management and architecture, while globally CIOs cited business acumen and security.

"Security is significantly lower in ANZ so it may be something we may need to look at and consider, or maybe we're efficient here," Waller said.

Other findings the survey showed was that purse strings for IT spending have continued to loosen slightly. Last year, Waller said the global weighted average this year is 2.2 percent, up from 1 percent last year. On a region by region basis, APAC is expected to see a 4.1 percent increase, and in ANZ a 2.9 percent increase in spending inside IT organisations.

As for where the money will be spent, the Gartner survey showed the priority for CIOs in ANZ and globally are within business intelligence and analytics. For ANZ though, this is followed by cloud, and digital marketing and mobile equally, compared to global CIOs who are going to be looking at infrastructure and datacentre, and then cloud.