Top Priorities for IT Managers

I’m a member of the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) and it’s a topic I’m trying to put on the member’s radar map. You see, I find Directors often separate these two items as somewhat unrelated to each. Or worst they still don’t even consider this important enough to elevate to C-level status or Board-level. I explained this situation to a retired CEO of one of the largest enterprises—we both sit on a board of another company. He just couldn’t understand this mindset since it’s critical to corporate survivability today. So what is it?

IT governance and compliance is the hot item!

And I firmly believe this has to integrate fully with corporate governance. In fact so much so that the majority of corporate boards today must have an IT authority on-board. Moreover, the IT officers must be on the c-executive team of corporations and not reporting from a sub-level. Some of the more successful companies are doing this and this has to expand out. It’s a driver behind their success!

So I read this report with interest from Silicon. “IT governance and compliance have replaced security as the number one item on the technology shopping list for IT bosses in 2006, according to silicon.com’s second annual CIO Agenda survey.” This doesn’t surprise me with more than 80% reporting this over security which had the top spot last year.

Other items of note in the report: e-mail security/monitoring and filtering still high on the list; outsourcing prominent; open source as being over-hyped (only one CIO will be moving to open source in 2006 and only at the server level); mass-market technologies having some impact (you see these gadgets everywhere right?).
Drop me a line here if you have some thoughts you want to share…

Thank you,
Stephen