CIO Challenge: Grow the Business While Cutting Costs

Learn first-hand how leading technology providers are developing midmarket technologies to solve key business and strategic challenges.

If there were any lessons to be learned for midmarket IT leaders in 2009, it surely was the need to be agile. With business conditions changing daily and the number of available IT resources dwindling, things were tough all over.

But as we move further into 2010, it looks as if business conditions are starting to change for the better, which brings with it a whole other set of challenges. Clearly, the business, and the amount of data that needs to be managed, is likely to grow. In fact, a survey we conducted recently of 138 senior midmarket IT executives finds that 28 percent said they expect data to grow faster than 25 percent, while 69 percent said data would grow at a rate of 1 to 25 percent. As the amount of data grows, so does the importance of data governance.

The survey was conducted in conjunction with our MidMarket CIO Forum, where our Mike Vizard is discussing the results you can flip through in this slideshow. For a complete breakdown of Mike’s view’s on the survey results, be sure to check his analysis over at our CTO Edge site.

A full 30 percent said data governance would be a much higher priority in 2010, while another 37 percent said it would be a somewhat higher priority. Feelings about compliance requirements were less clear-cut, with only 41 percent saying that compliance issues had a positive impact on the business and IT, while an equal number described compliance as a mixed bag of good and ill. The remaining 18 percent were more negative toward compliance.

Click through to see findings of our survey of MidMarket CIOs about how they are prioritizing initiatives in tough economic times.