CIOs must work harder to influence IT decisions in business budgets, according to Gartner.
As technology becomes a more essential part of business projects, the analyst firm recommends CIOs co-operate with other execs as well as the CFO to ensure new schemes get the right IT.
Cassio Dreyfuss, research vice president at Gartner, said: "IT has graduated from being a support tool to being a business enabling and a business creation tool. Under that much broader and inclusive perspective, it makes more sense to talk about IT-related expenditures in each and every business initiative and respective budget.
"In this way, the CIO is challenged to adopt a higher profile and actively engage in opportunities to influence IT decisions in business budgets."
However, the analyst house said it was vital that CIOs understand the business challenges and work styles of their firm to effectively influence IT-buying decisions and become more integral to the business.
Gartner said IT must effectively become two departments – ‘enterprise-strength IT’, focused on supporting reliable and efficient IT services, and ‘opportunistic IT’, ready to pounce on new business opportunities.
The latter can bring expertise on information architecture, business process networks, operations infrastructure and technology scenarios to any business budget discussions.
"These characteristics legitimise CIOs and their teams as advisors to all budgets in all functions within the enterprise," said Michael Smith, Gartner VP.
"In addition, IT leaders will advise business leaders on how to secure, integrate and manage the quality of the information that fuels digital business. These capabilities are what CIOs and their teams will have budgeting responsibility for as traditional organisations make the transformation to digital businesses."
