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New IBM Study Highlights Analytics As Top Priority For Today's CIO: Page 2 of 3

  --  Even as they build these standardized low-cost infrastructures, CIOs
      are able to focus 55 percent of their time on activities that drive
      innovation and growth, whereas traditional IT tasks like
      infrastructure and operations management now consume only 45 percent
      of their time.

"CIOs are investing in business analytics capabilities to help them improve decision-making at all levels," said Pat Toole, CIO of IBM. "In addition, in this challenging economy, CIOs understand that analytics can be key to new growth markets, whether it's new ways to manage a utility grid or smarter healthcare systems. Managing and leveraging new intelligence through analytics is something that today's CIO is pursuing to gain competitive advantage in these new markets."

"This study is a very important piece of work. The duality of the role of the CIO - to be both a visionary and a pragmatist, value creator and a cost cutter - is an issue I and most of the CIOs I talk to deal with every day," said Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, CIO and director of the Office for Technology, The Office of the New York State CIO/Office for Technology. "The fact that over 2,500 of my fellow CIOs shared their hopes, challenges and insights is helpful to me as I assess where I need to be professionally as a CIO and where my executive team needs to aspire to as part of my succession planning. I view this new Study as a great opportunity and challenge for my team to transform how we do business in the state of New York."

As the role of the CIO itself transforms so do the types of projects they lead across their enterprises, which will allow CIOs to focus less time and resources on running internal infrastructure, and more time on transformation to help their companies grow revenue. CIOs are transforming their infrastructure to focus more on innovation and business value, rather than simply running IT.

In the study, CIOs also identified the top visionary projects that they are working on now or foresee implementing in the future, ranging from process improvement to taking advantage of technologies that can provide immediate and long-term financial impact, such as: business intelligence and analytics, virtualization and green IT, service oriented architectures (SOA), service management, and cloud computing. CIOs are also focusing on mobility solutions and unified communications, collaboration and social networking tools, and Web 2.0 projects, to enable more effective communications for employees, customers, and partners.