Spending on customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is set to fall dramatically in 2019.
Budgets instead will be focussed on business intelligence/data analytics and cybersecurity tools.
That’s according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Agenda report.
The report surveyed 3,000 CIO’s across 89 countries with representation from all major industries. It found that 49 percent of CIOs say their enterprise is changing its business model as digitalisation really takes root.
Andy Rowsell-Jones, vice president and Gartner analyst: “What we see here is a milestone in the transition to the third era of IT, the digital era.”
“Initially, CIOs were making a leap from IT-as-a-craft to IT-as-an-industrial-concern.”
“Today, 20 years after we launched the first CIO Agenda survey, digital initiatives, along with growth, are the top priorities for CIOs in 2019. Digital has become mainstream.”
CIO Survey: Where Spending Will Rise and Fall
Asked “What are the technology areas where your organization will be spending the largest amount of new or additional funding in 2019?”, most CIOs were planning to boost expenditure on business intelligence/data analytics solutions.
Cybersecurity and cloud budgets were also set to increase in 2019, Gartner found.
CRM, ERP and “networking, voice and data communications” meanwhile were the three set to lose out as CIOs decrease investment in those areas.
Gartner’s survey meanwhile found that 33 percent of CIO’s were pushing their companies to scale up their digital endeavours in order to “increase consumer engagement” over digital channels.
“Volume, Scope and Agility”
Rowsell-Jones added: “The ability to support greater scale is being invested in and developed in three key areas: volume, scope and agility. All aim at encouraging consumers to interact with the organisation.”
“For example, increasing the scope means providing a variety of digital services and actions to the consumer. In general, the greater the variety of interactions that are available via digital channels, the more engaged a consumer becomes and the lower the costs to serve them are.”
What Can CIOs Do?
CIOs need to find ways to redistribute investments between business-as-usual systems, which consume 71 percent of their budgets, and the new, potentially disruptive technologies, Gartner emphasised. They also need to “build relationships with the business and other stakeholders while communicating the value of IT for digital business…”
See Also: The Top 10 Tech Trends to Watch in 2019
