The study also confirms the pervasive influence of business intelligence, which continues to rank as the most important business application/technology among top U.S. companies. The survey found increasing investments in virtualization and cloud computing, which were touted as the most significant emerging applications.
This is the second consecutive year business productivity and cost reduction nabbed the top spot by a wide margin, indicating continued austerity among businesses in today’s economic climate.
“The insights from the study confirm that the economic downturn is continuing to cause a significant shift in IT priorities,” said former SIM Executive VP Jerry Luftman, who has been a part of this research for the past 10 years and is currently executive director of Graduate Information Systems Programs and professor of Information Systems at Stevens Institute of Technology.
The SIM survey’s full list of IT concerns by rank are:
- Business productivity and cost reduction
- Business agility and speed to market
- IT and business alignment
- IT reliability and efficiency
- Business process re-engineering
- IT strategic planning
- Revenue generating IT innovations
- IT cost reduction
- Security and privacy
- Globalization
The top four concerns on the list separated themselves from the rest of the pack by a healthy margin. “Business agility and speed to market” rose from third to second place compared to last year’s list.
Five of the top ten concerns single out specific avenues of IT development, including IT strategic planning, revenue-generating IT innovations and IT/business alignment. Meanwhile, cost reduction specifically pertaining to IT investments fell in place near the back at number eight.
The survey polled CIOs, CTOs and senior IT executives from 172 U.S. companies, and for the first time, globalization was an option among concerns, debuting the list at number 10.
The full results of the survey will be presented October 5 in Atlanta at SIM’s annual SIMposium.
Justin Stephani is assistant editor at Insurance Networking News.
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