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.