4 November 2002 CIOs will become more like ‘city planners’ as organisations move towards a more process-driven computing infrastructure, according to Gartner CEO Michael Fleischer. As a result, four-fifths of CIOs will report to the board by 2005, compared to only half who do so today.
Fleischer was speaking at Gartner’s European IT symposium in Cannes, France. He suggested that CIOs will play an increasingly pivotal role in speeding up the execution of core business processes. In this evolving role, CIOs will sit alongside their CEOs in defining the business processes that will enable organisations to achieve their goals.
The CIO will then oversee the integration of applications and automation of business processes from above in the same way city planners plan the building of roads and amenities. Organisations must dismantle the ‘spaghetti network’ of application and process integration that eats up their time and budgets today, said Gartner research director Massimo Pezzini.
Steering away from forecasts on when organisations might see a recovery in IT spending, Gartner outlined how businesses could combine existing technologies, such as enterprise resource planning or portals, with newer ones, including web services, enterprise instant messaging or electronic tags, to build a real-time infrastructure.
“There is no killer app’ that will radically stimulate demand [for technology] in 2003,” Fleischer told attendees.
But ominously, Fleischer added that according to Gartner’s forecasts, half the technology brand names that exist today will disappear by 2004, although revenue growth rates at technology suppliers will soon stabilise at between 10% and 20%.
