CIOs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) expect their enterprise IT budget to increase 1.4 percent, on average, in 2017, says the 2017 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey.
While this figure represents the smallest increase of any of the world’s regions, it shows that CIOs in EMEA are clearly engaging with the era of digital business, Gartner said.
The move to go digital is visible as 50 percent of the survey respondents said they are participating in a digital ecosystem and 65 percent of them contacting startups to acquire key digital technology capabilities and skills.
The survey gathered data from 2,598 CIO respondents in 93 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $9.4 trillion in revenue/public-sector budgets and $292 billion in IT spending. 753 CIO respondents were from the EMEA region.
Twenty-eight percent of EMEA CIO respondents identify digitalization as their No. 1 business priority for 2017. This percentage is higher than those of their counterparts in other regions; it compares with 11 percent for North American respondents, 21 percent for those in Latin America and 22 percent for those in Asia/Pacific.
From a technology perspective, business intelligence (BI) and analytics remain the top investment priorities of EMEA CIOs.
“EMEA CIOs expect their enterprise IT budget to increase 1.4 percent, on average, in 2017 — the smallest increase of any of the world’s regions — but, despite this, spending on digitalization in EMEA is on the rise,” said Andy Rowsell-Jones, research vice president at Gartner.
“EMEA CIOs are spending an average of 19 percent of their enterprise IT budget on digital initiatives, a figure set to increase to 29 percent in 2018,” Rowsell-Jones added. “Their investments in digitalization include key technologies for traditional digital marketing and digital sales channels, advanced analytics, the Internet of Things, enhanced digital security solutions, and business algorithms and learning machines.”
As digitalization matures, it is likely that organizations which are investing in digital business will become part of a digital ecosystem, according to Gartner. Many will need to move away from a linear, value-chain-based business model, in which they trade with well-known partners and add value in stages, to become part of a faster and more dynamic networked digital ecosystem.
As digital business takes center stage for EMEA CIOs, it’s not only their participation in a digital ecosystem that is growing. “They are also increasing the number of digital partners they work with, from an average of 63 today to an expected 127 in 2018,” said Rowsell-Jones.
EMEA CIOs have also understood that by increasing the number of partners in their ecosystem, they extend the company’s reach and deliver greater business value.
Gartner believes that EMEA CIO’s interest in digitalization focuses on initiatives such as ‘Industry 4.0’, the European eGovernment Action Plan, the relative sophistication of financial technology in EMEA, and the extensive digitalization of solutions and services in industries such as transportation, logistics and retail.
EMEA CIOs have also made significant progress in bimodal IT practices. In 2015, 39 percent of those surveyed had bimodal IT, and this figure has risen to 41 percent this year. Bimodal IT offers great benefits: for 64 percent of the respondents, it’s bringing business and IT groups closer together, and for 52 percent it’s improving the perception of IT.
editor@infotechlead.com
