Gartner says CIOs must reimagine IT

IT professionals must re-imagine the role of IT in the coming year, according to a Gartner spokesperson, in the face of growing spending on such technology.

Peter Sondergaard, head of research for the company, highlighted how much IT impacts business performance. This means chief information officers must think about how a firm's operations can be improved through the reorganisation of responsibilities, such as IT technical support.

He claimed the IT sector must respond to the way business is becoming driven by customer relationships and fuelled by information. His comments follow a report by Gartner predicting that global IT spend will rise 3.9 per cent in 2012.

"The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT. It is a primary driver of job growth. This year, 350 companies will each invest more than $1 billion IT," Mr Sondergaard added.

In an interview reported by ZDNet, managing vice president of Gartner, Daryl Plummer, pointed out that another key trend is the way non-IT departments are getting bigger technology budgets than IT divisions.

He described it as being a "shifting subtlety" over the past few years, with Gartner predicting that 35 per cent of enterprise IT expenditures will be covered by a non-IT budget by 2015.

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