CIOs facing flat IT budgets this year

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Chief information officers (CIOs) don't have extra budget to look forward to this year, but they can take comfort in the fact that the credibility of their role has risen as a result of their efforts to do more with less during the recession.

So claims research from analyst Gartner, which claims that IT budgets will be flat during 2010 - the equivalent of the same levels of cash organisations had to play with back in 2005.

But it's not all bad news. While there isn't more money in the pot, recovery is in sight and the image of the CIO has been enhanced rather than adversely affected by the recession, according to Dave Aron, a Gartner vice president.

"The sense is that a lot of the real pain has happened in the last year. This year will be more about productivity rather than just efficiency. In the recession, CIOs have fared well in terms of credibility," he said during an interview with IT PRO.

"Since the dot com crash, [credibility] has been at a fairly low point and it's been gradually building. It's been taken to a new level in the last year."

So while budgets aren't really changing, technology and business priorities are, according to Gartner's study of global CIOs. Business process improvement and reducing enterprise costs make it to the two top spots in terms of business focus, while virtualisation and cloud computing hog those places from the tech side.

"When you look at business processes and the CIO's strategy, using information and intelligence to drive the business forward is high. The information to drive the business is high [on the agenda] but the technology [that facilitates that] has dropped down," Aron added.

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