Enterprises Are Entering the Third Era of IT

Enterprises Are Entering the Third Era of IT
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Digital business is maturing, from tentative experiment to application at massive scale. CIOs must evolve their thinking to be in tune with this new era of rapid increases in the scale of digital business. Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs showed that the CIO role will remain critical in transformation workflows.

The 2019 Gartner CIO Agenda survey gathered data from more than 3,000 CIO respondents in 89 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $15 trillion in revenue/public-sector budgets and $284 billion in IT spending. The survey results show that digital business reached a tipping point this year. Forty-nine percent of CIOs report their enterprises have already changed their business models or are in the process of changing them.

“What we see here is a milestone in the transition to the third era of IT, the digital era,“ said Andy Rowsell-Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Initially, CIOs were making a leap from IT-as-a-craft to IT-as-an-industrial-concern. Today, 20 years after we launched the first CIO Agenda survey, digital initiatives, along with growth, are the top priorities for CIOs in 2019. Digital has become mainstream.“

The survey found that 33 percent of respondents worldwide evolved their digital endeavors to scale, up from 17 percent in the previous year. The major driver for scale is the intent to increase consumer engagement via digital channels. The transformation toward digital business is supported by steady IT budget growth.

The leader in budget growth is Asia/Pacific with an expected growth of 3.5 percent. However, this is a significant cut from the 5.1 percent projected budget increase in 2018. EMEA (3.3 percent) and North America (2.4 percent) both project an increase, while Latin America trails behind with projected growth of 2 percent in 2019, down from 2.8 percent this year.

Disruptive emerging technologies will play a major role in reshaping business models as they change the economics of all organizations. Gartner asked CIOs and IT leaders which technologies they expect to be most disruptive. AI was by far the most mentioned technology and takes the spot as the top game-changer technology away from data and analytics, which is now occupying second place. Although this year’s question was asked slightly differently, the jump to first place is enormous: even the top performers went from only 7 percent to 40 percent.

With regards to implementation, when asked about their organization’s plans in terms of following digital technologies and trends, 37 percent responded that they already deployed AI technology or that deployment was in short-term planning. In fact, AI comes in second, behind cybersecurity (88 percent). The survey indicates that in most enterprises the CIO still owns the responsibility for cybersecurity. However, the IT organization alone can’t provide cybersecurity anymore.

The rise of social engineering attacks, such as phishing, require a broader behavioral change of all employees. In 24 percent of the digitally top-performing organizations, it is the boards of directors that are accountable for cybersecurity rather than the CIO alone. Nevertheless, to improve security against cyberthreats, in all organizations, CIOs are combining measures to harden information-processing assets with efforts to influence the people that use technology.