According to a new report from Gartner, CIOs around the world are facing high levels of uncertainty as 2015 gets underway.
A global survey by Gartner showed that issues experienced by CIOs are far from universal and real differences exist at both a regional and country level.
“The only certainty for CIOs seems to be the unstoppable advancement of digitalization,” said Dave Aron, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Government, companies and our personal lives are being more deeply penetrated by digital capabilities, opportunities and threats. Digitalization represents both a massive opportunity and new and heightened levels of threat for all countries and companies, and CIOs are facing new, more challenging and more exciting circumstances as digital moves to center stage.”
CIOs in the U.S., for example, report an IT budget increase of 0.9 percent for 2015. While the average growth in IT budgets is marginally smaller in the U.S. than the rest of the world (0.9 percent vs. 1.1 percent), only one of eight CIOs in the U.S. is facing a decreasing IT budget.
“Looking beyond the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobility, social and big data) and into the next generation of disruptive ‘SMART’ technologies — sensors, maker machines (3D print), augmented humans, robotics and thinking machines — the survey revealed that for every category, the percentage of U.S. CIOs that says ‘not relevant right now’ is larger than their global counter parts.”
CIOs in China, on the other hand, revealed an IT budget increase of 8.5 percent. According to the report summary, that’s “way above the global average of 1.1 percent.”
Gartner says that historical data shows that the IT budget at enterprises in China is much lower than the global average. This means that the high increase of IT budget is coming from a very low base.
The Special Report on CIOs and their regional differences is available on Gartner’s website here.
