2007 Business Priorities

Gartner just published the results of an interesting survey in an article titled, “The 2007 CIO agenda." Today I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation summarizing their findings. The presentation was insightful and, over the next few weeks' postings, I will refer back to this report.

One of the key questions posed to execs (CIOs) was what their business priorities for 2007 might be. Here are the results, in order of priority:

1. Improving business processes
2. Controlling enterprise-wide operating costs
3. Attracting, retaining and growing customer relationships
4. Improving the effectiveness of the enterprise workforce
5. Need for revenue growth
6. Improving enterprise competitiveness (bottom line profitability)
7. Expanding use of information/intelligence in products and services
8. Deploying new business capabilities to meet strategic goals
9. Entering new markets, new products or new services
10. Faster innovation (shorter product/service life cycles)

At the top of the list is “Improving business processes," which is the top priority for the third year in a row. I think it's clear this will drive growth in the BPM space, and we'll see software vendors like Microsoft trying to enter this market. (Microsoft has been trying to gain a foothold in this market with BizTalk and Windows Workflow Foundation--an offering that is falling short compared to full fledged BPM vendors.)

Cost control continues to be an important business strategy. CIOs continue to feel pressure to deliver more value for less $$$.

The new items that appear on the list are as follows:

• Increasing workforce effectiveness (#4) points to ITs involvement in dong more than just providing tools and information.


• Deploying new business capabilities to meet strategic goals (#7) recognizes that IT is expected to go beyond deploying systems to changing the way the enterprise works.


• Entering new markets, products or services (#9) establishes the fact that IT is expected to play a role in business growth processes.
  

This is a direct reflection on a continued expansion of business expectations for IT.

Overall, these strategies are inline with my company’s business strategies. 2007 will be another year of great opportunities and increased demand on IT.