This is a fascinating but also precarious time to be a CIO,
particularly one with global responsibilities. CIOs are being given
more strategic roles than ever before, yet they're simultaneously
seeing their budgets cut while expectations remain unrelenting, and
of course the global recession only complicates the situation.
CIOs are being asked to drive business change while at the same
time many are trying to replace old and inflexible infrastructures
with modern and flexible ones. They're being given responsibility
for establishing global standards in applications and related
processes, but sometimes without the organizational authority to
enforce those new standards. And across the globe, CIOs are
fighting the stubborn perception that IT in general, and CIOs and
their teams in particular, are cost centers rather than creators of
value and accelerators of innovation.
In this best-of-times, worst-of-times scenario, CIOs can find
enormous value in seeing how their peers around the world are
dealing with these difficult and urgent imperatives. So
InformationWeek's Global CIO has developed a couple of projects to
give you some of that global peer-level perspective:
In the Global CIO 50, we've identified 50 of the top CIOs from
around the world and profiled them and the strategic contributions
they're making to their companies. We selected CIOs and their
companies based on market leadership, innovative IT-enabled
business practices and results, and the achievement and impact of
the individual CIOs.
The Global CIO research report, ‘Small World, Big
Opportunities,’ is based on an exclusive, primary-research
survey conducted across multiple countries to determine top
priorities, approaches, and attitudes for CIOs around the world. We
received more than 2,000 completed surveys, but because we wanted
to focus on CIO-level reactions, we culled the 861 responses from
CIOs and VPs of IT and built our study on their input.
Among the key findings from our Global CIO best practices report
are the three top priorities cited by CIOs from around the globe:
working to spend less money on internal IT issues and more on
external, customer-facing projects (our old friend, the 80/20
ratio); developing and refining new ways to capture and communicate
the business value of IT efforts and expenses on global projects;
and shifting the internal outlooks of worldwide IT organizations to
reflect global perspectives rather than domestic ones.