The McKinsey Quarterly — What’s on CIO agendas in 2007

Janaki Akella, Kishore Kanakamedala, and Roger P. Roberts — January 2007
Two trends in information technology will become increasingly important to CIOs in 2007: a migration to service-oriented architectures and the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations. These are among the results of our most recent survey of senior IT executives. The survey asked CIOs and other senior executives in North American companies about their plans for the coming year.

New technologies and trends constantly compete for a share of the enterprise IT budget, and during each cycle, one or two rise above the others to become a major focus for CIOs. In 2006 two areas of critical focus have been software as a service and server consolidation and virtualization — two trends that CIOs, a year earlier, had cited as important.

Just in case the rise of service-oriented architecture was catching you by surprise! SOA, which might as well mean Suspend Other Activities, is flavour of the year in many organizations and with many suppliers.

A cautionary note: this is an American survey and is of only 72 “senior IT executives”. This doesn’t mean the results are necessarily inapplicable elsewhere or unrepresentative, just that they might be.

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