Welcome to the 2017 CIO and IT Leadership Survey Report.

Working with our clients over the past year, we have seen a number of themes emerging across multiple industries.

Therefore, this year we decided to test a few hypotheses:

• Technology maturity, or adoption,would play a part in driving different ways of organising IT
• People, culture and ways of working are being overlooked
• Organisations are not yet seeing the benefit of technology implementation because they are not adjusting their IT operating model accordingly
• Technology Revolution vs. Marketing Spin – we are undergoing more marketing than revolution

This has been a very interesting year to undertake the survey, there are insights that we expected to see and others that we didn’t. Here’s what we found:

A year of consolidation

It appears to have been a year of consolidation for organisations within the technology arena to bring more maturity into each of the key topics that are on everyone’s mind – moving away from simple headline ideas to specialisms and niche areas.

Technology adoption driving organisational change

It also appears that greater technology adoption is beginning to drive a different type of organisation.  We believe that the assimilation of these new technologies and ways of working into traditional structures, and expecting them to drive value within them, may well not be the right answer. Looking at the results of the survey, we believe some organisations are thinking the same way. However, our experience shows that now more than ever leadership and the correct skills in the correct place are key to driving the greatest value from technology. Whilst we continue to see a portrait in the market being painted that things are getting easier, we don’t believe this is the case.

Traditional ‘tower’ models are being challenged

Most organisations are still organising around technology for infrastructure, but increasingly for other areas many are moving towards perhaps more devolved and looser structures to aid delivery.

The towers are actually being replaced by different technology groupings, such as Big Data, Digital and so on; defining as product and service rather than technology.

A marketing and product led revolution

The expectation on IT has never been higher. Today, the possibilities offered by technology are greater than ever before, driving the complexity and choices that organisations are dealing with. We have a global marketing machine driving a vision across multiple high level technology groupings and we believe this translates into the organisational and service led change that we are seeing, not the technology itself. Technology as an enabler and being able to deliver against this vision has never been in a better position, however as we have already said the technology world is more complex than ever.

Click to read the 2016 Report