In many organizations the annual planning cycle is well underway. Some CIOs and CTOs enjoy a privileged position and are at the heart of shaping the future of their organization through this process. Others are at the receiving end of this process and work under constraints that make it hard to deliver technology-enabled value creation for the enterprise. The difference sometimes comes down to personal characteristics: charismatic leaders, strong communicators and proven relationship builders often achieve greater impact. But there is also an institutional aspect. A good understanding of the role and value of technology among all executives in the organization makes it much easier to deliver impact.  How can this be improved?

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A recent study of global CIOs by IBM shows that what keeps CIOs up at night isn't necessarily just  short term IT cost pressure. The study indicates that  intelligence & analytics (cited by 83% of respondents) and virtualization (cited by 76% of respondents) are top of mind.

This makes sense and suggests  that CIOs are thinking ahead in terms of how IT can help position their companies for success in the new normal.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that technology companies are beginning to increase advertising budgets in hopes that IT purchasing is going to turn the corner and begin to pickup after a slow year due to the recession.

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For the second year running we have surveyed European telecoms on their IT use. Our  benchmark study looks at IT spending as a share of revenues and also probes the IT effectiveness of telecom operators. While the IT spend on revenues is easy to measure,  IT effectiveness is more complicated. We have developed a score that takes into account three key dimensions: time-to-market for new products and new tariffs, IT service availability and functional coverage per key IT domain (e.g., sales & marketing, provisioning).

Preliminary findings show that fixed line operators have improved their cost position by about 1 percentage point, which is a a significant improvement, while their effectiveness score rose by about 10 percent. Mobile operators have not improved their cost position but have improved their IT effectiveness by about 6 percent.

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We are seeing a burgeoning of innovation in the application of information technologies in the public sector.  One trend is the increasing willingness of governments to make their data available to citizens and other organizations outside of government through which they can create their innovative services. But just making the data available is not enough; it must be made usable by visualizing it in ways that create insight, or embedded into other tools.  Several organizations advocating for greater government transparency are creating very innovative applications that visualize public data.

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We have seen a steady increase in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal collaboration and for communicating with customers. Interestingly, the percentage of companies using these technologies for connecting with business partners and suppliers has remained relatively constant over the three years.

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In our most recent Web 2.0 survey, we turned our attention to a question that many of our clients have been asking us: Where is the real business value from deploying Web 2.0?  Our most striking result is that two-thirds of our respondents had derived measurable business value from their use of Web 2.0.

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Building an IT infrastructure for health systems – one that connects all the players in a national healthcare system via a single information network – is seen as the next giant leap for improving healthcare delivery in industrialized countries. Among the many potential benefits are electronic and automated referrals that would guide each patient on an the best path through the healthcare system from general practitioners to specialists to after care, ePrescriptions that would  automatically prevent harmful  interactions between drugs prescribed by different physicians, and  universal electronic health records  for individuals that would  reduce the need for duplicate diagnoses.

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I attended a major software and IT services conference in China last week.  Many of the domestic industry's great and the good were present. For the first time in many years the mood was downbeat.

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Last year saw many shocks to the economy. For those of us based in Asia, falling demand from mature markets was clearly one of the most significant. Still, once it became clear that demand was only headed in one direction – down – it became easier to plan accordingly.

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