Essential New Year resolutions for CIOs in 2009, says Gartner

As Mark Raskino, vice president and fellow at Gartner, says, introducing the analyst’s views: “The unfolding economic crisis of late 2008 has created a more challenging situation than many businesses and most CIOs have ever experienced. They face a daunting and uncertain year ahead. “Many CIOs have already been instructed to operate with lower budgets and many more expect such instructions. Chief executives need to cut short-term costs very quickly to cope with volatile market sentiment in many industries and countries, but without damaging recovery growth prospects.” However, Garter’s key advice is to use the time and concern afforded by the recession to exploit your technology and resources to create something new. Hence its top 10 and four key themes. Theme one is about reinforcing strengths and assets. 1. Start building an alumni network to maintain legacy skills and experienced pools of labour with their own web page, social networking tools and re bounty schemes. 2. Stop being the exception that enforces the rules: in difficult times, leading by example matters more than usual, observes Gartner, so CIOs should think about signals, values and behaviours that maintain the direction they want. 3. Start scouting for key talent: as laid-off people flood the market, some salary-level attrition is inevitable and even good people could find themselves without a position for months – creating a buyers market for high-calibre IT talent in 2009. Gartner’s second theme is about preparing for the next change, which it believes may come sooner than you think. 4. Prepare for the unexpected: Gartner says it’s still important to challenge and develop the thinking styles and frame of reference of your leadership team, as well as yourself. 5. Start using social systems: Gartner says CIOs need to start visibly using these networks to kick-start participation from other staff. 6. Start taking cloud computing seriously: Gartner believes cloud is a major new stage in the evolution of commercial IT that CIOs must take seriously, but that at this stage remains confusing. Theme three is about surviving in 2009 without collateral damage. 7. Stop ignoring people and opting for soft targets: CIOs will be under pressure to be seen taking swift action so there will be a temptation to cut quickly in areas where staff are working on longer-term goals. However, CIOs should not lay off the people they will need long-term and who will be hard to replace just because their work is not an immediate deliverable. 8. Start offering your vendors a free lunch: CIOs will require vendors to deliver flexibility and cost savings and need to reset the style of the relationship. At the same time, suppliers will be keen on staying in close touch, working hard to attract CIOs off-site, so CIOs must resolve to politely decline vendor courtesy trips in 2009. 9. Stop fearing the future; start driving it: meaning that, internally, CIOs should reflect “conspicuous frugality but not be defined by it”. They should resolve to occasionally and visibly splash out a little – where it really matters to staff moral, such as on training courses or software development tools. Theme four is about newer technologies 10. CIOs need to protect time to stay in touch and get ‘hands-on’ with some key technologies in 2009 – including: e-book readers, Google Chrome, building mini cloud applications, using YouTube as a default search engine for a day and HD teleconferencing.