Gartner annual survey of CIO priorities

Gartner's annual survey of CIOs (1,400 surveyed with average IT budget of $ 71 million and staff of 300 IT employees) shows Business Process Improvement as the highest priority for 2006. Not surprising based on comments I got back from a few of them as they read my "process angioplasty" post.

Many of the innovative CIOs I have written about in the last year - Steelcase, Starbucks, others have focused on mobility, telemetry, predictive analytics, biometrics and collaboration applications. They have found huge paybacks from relatively small investments in those areas. Not surprisingly, those technologies get high priority. While the software industry keeps hyping up SOA as the silver bullet, CIOs rated that 6th in importance on technology priority. Another buzzword "virtualization" shows up 9th.