Taking upon itself the cause of giving the India CIO fraternity a platform to express itself and come together for better collaboration, the India CIO Association initiated the CIO Klub in 2008. With encouragement and participation from CIOs across major Indian cities, the club has successfully completed a year and to commemorate this occasion, it released the results of the ‘Enterprise IT Investment Trends Survey 2009’ in association with Ernst & Young.

The survey was conducted with an aim to provide an objective and meaningful assessment of IT budgets in the current financial year. The club involved about 123 CIOs affiliated to organisations of all sizes in the survey and interacted with them in April this year.

The Enterprise IT Investment Trends Survey 2009 presents some interesting findings, which can be beneficial to the CIO from a decision-making point of view and to analysts from a trend spotting perspective. The survey clearly states that this year is being viewed by CIOs as a year of consolidation and rationalisation.

Despite a budget crunch in light of the economic scenario, new investments are being planned but with a hint of cautiousness. Every investment sanctioned has to first go under the scanner of a detailed cost-benefit analysis. As expected, CIOs have unanimously voted 'IT cost reduction' as the first priority and are using optimisation of resources as a passport to achieve this.

The survey reveals that CIOs will continue to invest in:

•    Enhancing information and physical security infrastructure
•    Advanced enterprise applications
•    Outsourcing of non-core functions
•    Maximising RoI from existing investments
•    IT process framework

While a few new-age IT initiatives were being talked about incessantly earlier, they may not attract differential spending now as they need to be adaptable and relevant contributors to the business to be adopted by CIOs during tough times.

Though cost-cutting might be the current focus, enterprises are also preparing themselves for the future and for this are turning to the CIO to provide leadership to improve overall organisational effectiveness through better IT systems. The CIO’s role is increasingly being transformed into a business leader as he/ she continues to significantly contribute to management and business decisions.

Top five CIO priorities that the survey highlights are:

•    IT cost reduction
•    Information security
•    Business continuity planning/ Disaster recovery planning
•    Implementing advanced enterprise applications (CRM/ BI/ DW)
•    IT consolidation

In conclusion, the survey states that most CIOs will prefer selective investments and will also look at maximising their existing IT investments. All in all, this year will revolve around leveraging the existing IT environment with added focus on security for a majority of the CIOs.