Dive Brief:
- A complete view, understanding and management of IT investments accelerate CIOs' and tech leadership's ability to drive innovation forward despite disruption, according to Snow Software's 2021 IT Priorities Report released Thursday.
- Snow surveyed 1,000 IT leaders and 3,000 workers throughout the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany and Australia and concluded insight and governance of tech ecosystems is key to achieving 2021 IT priorities and pandemic recovery.
- As companies face new strain on IT budgets due to the rapid acceleration of digital transformation, "it’s more important than ever that CIOs and IT leaders strike the right balance between managing risk and remaining agile in the face of continued unpredictability," Snow CIO Alastair Pooley said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Faster digital transformation, increased spend across the board, risk from current events and new employee challenges marked 2020 IT priorities, according to the Snow survey. As leadership and the workforce prepare for 2021, transformation, budget and the other factors are expected to slow.
CIOs will be expected to keep up with the changing landscape, but the report indicates they may not be equipped to handle it. Less than half (41%) of IT leaders surveyed by Snow agreed they have the capacity to report on all tech use and spend across the enterprise.
In 2021, Gartner predicts IT trends centered around pragmatism, rather than innovation. People centricity, location independence and resilient delivery will be crucial to meeting CIOs' priorities of the future as deployment and execution take on new meaning.
Despite Snow's findings about innovation, emerging technologies such as machine learning are "not really where people's heads are right now," according to Brian Burke, research VP at Gartner, during the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas last month.
Instead, the top strategic trends for 2021 include practical efforts such as internet of behaviors, total experience and privacy-enhancing computation.
Facing budget fluctuations in 2021, "there's a heightened need for organizations around their cost management," Chris Ganly, senior director analyst at Gartner, said during a different session at the same symposium.
Strategic budget management will be necessary to transform from cost-cutting to measure to value creation and overcome the spend discrepancies reported by Snow.
