Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO.

The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!

“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”

The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:

“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”

CIO UK has released an updated list of the 100 top spenders on IT in the UK – available here. The DWP, MOD, Shell, Tesco and the Department of Health top the list, while RBS has slipped out of the top 5 and Lloyds out of the top 10.

It’s hard to draw significant suprising trends from the list – public sector largely moving up the list, banks still near the top but slightly down, sectors like construction and retail taking a hit…

Where the list is particularly interesting is in the detailed profiles of each organisation’s IT strategy/performance/existing infrastructure. There are also some specific examples of popular projects for the year:

“Many were considering overhauling their communications networks to support either voice over IP or unified communications. Upgrading Microsoft Office and operating systems was also high on the list of tasks, as were improvements to e-commerce and customer management systems.”

It’s valuable information; now the question becomes how you best use this insight to support decisions/activities focused on these organisations. (You might also ask, assuming all the compeition will be targeting the top 100, how you get hold of the names of the organisations that came 100-150 on the table…)

There seems to be a growing feeling that the priorities behind IT investments are changing once again. Rounding up views from McKinsey and Gartner research, as well as recent stories from major corporations, shines some light on how we may be able to use this to our advantage…

IT budget projections from McKinsey

According to McKinsey’s survey (results available here), while operating budgets are largely expected to continue at the reduced levels of 2009, the story for new investments tells a more cautiously optimistic story. More than 45 percent of respondents expect to increase investments, while about 20 percent see them holding steady. Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away (back in 2007, 69 percent were predicting increased investments for 2008), but it does point to a return to more strategic considerations for IT.

There are some interesting industry variations – with Financial Services leading the pack in making investments (61 percent expecting to increase new investments, up from 40 percent last year).

Reasons why from Gartner

Gartner’s recent CIO research paints a similar picture (”2010 IT budgets are projected to be flat increasing by a weighted global average of 1.3 percent in nominal terms, compared with 2009 levels where IT budgets declined 8.1 percent”). The main thrust of Gartner’s opinion seems to be that we’re moving from cost-cutting priorities to a drive for productivity gains. These gains are about opening up to fresh thinking, smart innovations – but not massive costs…

“These productivity gains will come from collaborative and innovative solutions that take advantage of the new “lighter-weight” services-based and social media technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing.”

If we thought that IT decision-makers were open to outside ideas when it came to making massive cost reductions in the IT budget, that may pale to insignificance compared to their thirst for insight around these ‘lighter-weight’ smarter-thinking options.

Change in action at the BBC, Deutsche Bank and Barclays

Three big changes in technology strategy in January seem to support the argument that 2009 was a year of significant strategic thinking going on in the background, and that this year we will see investments begin to catch-up.

First, Computing reports on the BBC’s strategy roadmap for technology over the next two to five years. The BBC’s CTO John Linwood supports Gartner’s recommendation of lighter-weight technology: “broadcast systems need to be increasingly agile, flexible and able to adapt quickly to new demands.” As we’ve seen several times already, standardisation will be one of the buzzwords of 2010, and the BBC report continues this theme: “The BBC must strive for further standardisation in the technology solutions it employs to minimise the overall costs and maximise re-use. The use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies and solutions should be the preferred option. Whilst specific customisation is necessary it must be done consciously and when commercial off the shelf offerings have been evaluated.” 

Next, we have the New Statesman’s coverage of Deutsche Bank’s plans to replace various solutions with a single new core banking system from SAP: “The SAP implementation shall underpin the bank’s strategy to push for a high degree of industrialization and standardization of processes. The bank is also looking to achieve flexibility in its IT infrastructure, building on standardized, modular SAP software functions within a SOA.”

Finally, an interesting report on Barclays from Computer Weekly describes how the bank is taking a number of outsourced contracts back in house. Following the decision in December to bring the management of desktop systems back in house, last week saw the decision not to renew the application development contract with Accenture. It’s open to speculation on which factors were most important of cost, flexibility, business alignment, control…

So three very different stories to start the year – all the combination of a long time thinking and justifying investments that are now coming on-line. We can expect to see more changes in direction as other businesses follow suit and place their bets for the recovery – and by 2011 we may well be sick of the words standardisation, flexibility and productivity…

IBM has claimed that analytics will be bigger than CRM and ERP combined, heralding a new era of “information led transformation”.

Interviewed by MyCustomer.com, Ovum analyst  Madan Sheina said “The company is now poised to funnel even more of its profits into BI and analytics over the coming years, anticipating that they will be bigger than the ERP market two decades prior – the tipping point being a shift from business automation to business optimisation.” The company’s main “information on demand” products centre around sales analytics, workforce performance and supply chain management.

Richard Holway, IT market analyst and guru, has said he’s seeing a narrowing gap between offshore and onshore due to the recession. He made the comments whilst commenting on Logica’s Q3 results, in which he noted that outsourcing was performing well for the company. “Outsourcing was the star driver. Up 11% in both Q3 and YTD. Looks like order intake is strong too as Book to Bill is 103% YTD.” You can see the full detail on his news service site TechMarketView.

Cisco and EMC launched a joint venture called “Acadia” last week, which will “bundle EMC storage gear, VMware management tools and Cisco networking and computing products with dedicated services” according to the Financial Times. In an interview, Cisco’s chief executive, John Chambers, told the FT that the deal could be the most significant technology alliance in a decade.

Acadia’s offer is aimed at competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM , said the paper, and the new venture is chasing a slice of the $350bn annual market for core computing products, consulting and maintenance.

FT’s Techwatch blog has, this week, been suggesting there’s another tech bubble at play, focusing on the successes of Intel and Apple. Commenting on the results, the blog suggested tech was leading the charge for the recovery… ”most of the big tech companies have turned in pretty solid earnings in the past few weeks. Investors have been most interested, though, in their outlook for the coming year. By and large, they have been getting what they need, if little more–signs that tech customers are buying, and that they the recovery is gaining traction, with tech once again leading the way.”

Research from Computer Economics in North America has shown that mid- and smaller sized companies are embracing IT outsourcing. Report Author Frank Scavo says “These findings suggest the outsourcers are doing a much better job of communicating their value proposition into the small and mid-market. That’s interesting because while traditionally we tend to think smaller companies are willing to try new things, in this market at least, they are surprisingly conservative.”

Irregular Enterprise has produced a useful summary of the key findings of the report:

• Outsourcing services gaining the most strength among customers include help desk, desktop support, data center operations, and website/e-commerce systems outsourcing. Large organizations, in particular, are making greater use of help desk outsourcing.

• Outsourcing services making the smallest gains are application maintenance, application development, and data network operations service providers. Application development, while still the single most frequently outsourced function, is losing ground in the current economic environment as organizations cut back on project-based work.

• The three most popular IT functions to outsource include data center operations, disaster recovery, and website/e-commerce systems. These IT functions are both frequently outsourced and outsourced at relatively high levels compared to other functions in this study.

• The typical IT organization spends about 5% to 6% of its total IT budget on outsourcing services. This is true regardless of the organization’s size.

• IT organizations are experiencing the most cost overruns with application development, website/e-commerce systems, and data network operations outsourcing contracts. They have the easiest time predicting costs for IT security, voice network operations, and data center operations outsourcing contracts.

• Application development and application maintenance are most-frequently offshore outsourced IT functions, while disaster recovery services and IT security are the two functions least likely to be sent to offshore service providers.

Retailing giant Tesco has, according to the Harvard Business Review’s John Quelch, ”taken the lead in promoting its  [corporate responsibility] Sustainable Consumption Initiative, now being copied by Wal-Mart.”

In an article highlighting that CR programmes are not just surviving, but thriving, in a recession Quelch says that  Tesco “plans to require carbon footprint information to be placed on the label of every product sold in its stores.” He ties this back to the trend that shoes a growng segment of consumers worldwide considers CR evaluations important in selecting among brands across a wide range of categories.

Terry Leahy, Tesco’s CEO, wants to make it easy for consumers to incorporate environmental impact criteria in their purchasing. As he says: “To achieve a mass movement in green consumption is to empower everyone, not just the enlightened or the affluent.” Corporations cannot change the world on their own. They need to empower their customers to help change the world for themselves.”

For all of Tesco’s major suppliers, this must be a hell of an ask.  They are effectively demanding CR measurements and focus back up their supply chain. For those suppliers, these demands can surely only only be met by using actionable using data driven from IT systems. Certainly to accurately measure carbon footprint across product lines going foward will require IT support. This resonates with my earlier post this month that revealed CIO’s challenges for 2010 and beyond, that many CIOs are heavily focused on interrogating data to support decision-making. If you can help Tesco’s suppliers out with this challenge right now, you’re well placed.

IBM has just released its first global CIO study, free to download from their website. It covers the findings of over 2500 interviews with CIOs from across the world.

For those marketing to CIOs, the study points to contined unpredictable conditions  – 90% of the CIOs interviewed believe that there’s moderate or substantial change ahead for them. The top 3 factors driving this belief were agreed to be business model changes, budgets and macroeconomic factors.

Other major findings are that CIOs split their time between 3 main activities – making innovation real, raising the ROI of IT and expanding business impact. The levels to which they spend time on these depend very much on whether those CIOs work for high, medium or low growth organisations. 10 minutes spent reviewing the numbers in detail is worthwhile as there are some useful nuggets – the heavy usage of collaboration tools in the high growth environments is one. Another is the fact that all CIOs are seeing that IT is “key to making business models unique and difficult to imitate.” The relentless march of SaaS is obviously not causing a “utility” situation to arise just yet!

CIOs are spending their time now and in the medium term on plans that enhance competitiveness (83%) and virtualisation (76%). They are also highly focused on “making the data sing” – interrogating data to support decision making – especially around new ways to meet customer need. The unpredictability to the customer in the recession has clearly put a lot of pressure on IT to use data to reveal what they might do next.

For many marketers, one of the study’s most interesting findings is the conflict that’s increasingly inherent in the CIO’s role. Many of the verbatims and case studies draw this out… “I need to introduce new services without disrupting existing ones”… “I need to reduce costs and improve services”. It strikes me that acknowledging this in marketing material, and offering ways that these dichotomies could be resolved, might be one way to strike a chord with CIOs.