Another area Blosch pointed to is business intelligence (BI). With purse strings still tight, CIOs will fight to spend on BI, he said, because "they think that it will help them understand their markets and customers much better. It's a way for them to get the returns on investment that they still believe they desperately need."
Technology for its own sake, Blosch said, is dead on arrival with today's CIOs. They're far more interested in what the technology can do to advance a business process than the technology itself. "When we asked them if they believed there would be a 'next big thing' in technology," said Blosch, "more than a third of them said 'no.'"
And the hot-button issue of outsourcing -- hot at least with voters and lawmakers in the U.S. -- will only get hotter, as CIOs continue to press for lower costs, which leads them to shift services overseas.
"Outsourcing is set to continue, and grow quite significantly," Blosch concluded from the survey. "But while it's a key initiative in many companies, business process outsourcing remains a bit of a blind spot for many CIOs." Two-thirds of the CIOs polled by Gartner EXP, for instance, didn't see the issue as important now, or even through 2007.
"The truth about outsourcing is that CIOs are still learning how to make it work," he said.
