The Marketing Bureau

CIOs no longer see CRM software as the key to managing customer relationships effectively but are instead turning to a much broader range of technologies to help the business achieve its goals, says Gartner - www.gartner.com
First Published on www.mycustomer.com

According to the researcher’s latest survey among 1,586 CIOs working in organisations across 27 industries and 41 countries, even though customer-related aims figured highly in respondents top 10 business priorities, CRM software was nowhere to be seen among their 10 most important technology focuses.

'Attracting and retaining customers' ranked fifth in IT bosses' list of top business goals, followed by 'targeting customers and markets more effectively' at number eight. 'Expanding current customer relationships' came in bottom of the league table at number ten, however, while business process improvement was top.

Dave Aron, a vice president at Gartner, said: "As we see a return to growth and organisations look at various ways of improving customer relationships, CIOs are saying that there are other ways than CRM to drive growth in customer terms and obtain a greater share of their wallet. It doesn’t look like they believe CRM is the key any more, but no other single technology is either, whether that’s across one company or all of them."

This means that organisations are now starting to look at employing IT more strategically, for example, by introducing more flexible infrastructures to cope with merger and acquisition activity or introducing technology to support their sales and marketing functions more effectively in specific ways.

As a result, while there is a clear business trend towards returning growth, "there’s not a definite picture of how technology will help," Aron said.

Interestingly, however, web 2.0 technologies, which include both enabling technologies and social media such as blogs, wikis and web sites like Facebook, have increased in interest.

They rose to the number three slot in terms of technology priorities this year, up from fifteenth both in 2008 and 2009 – although the change does not mean that IT bosses will necessarily invest in this area, just that they are taking it more seriously.

Business intelligence (BI) software, which includes customer analytics, went in the opposite direction, meanwhile, dropping from top slot to number five this year.

"BI ceded the way for more light-weight technologies such as collaboration and social networking. What people are saying here is that they need to make more informed decisions, but it’s not clear that they believe traditional BI approaches, and BI software in particular, will help," said Aron.

The worst year ever

According to Mark McDonald, Gartner group vice president, executive programmes, 2009 was the worst year for IT budgets ever. Overall, the 1,600 companies represented $126 billion dollars in IT spend.  “If  this recovery follows past recessions we generally see IT see 1% increases a year after general recovery.,” he commented “In the public sector, which has still to face a lot of the cutbacks that have been made in the private sector, that means 2010 will be very tight although 2011 could be lighter.”

In 2009 the top three priorities in descending order were improving IT governance; implementing IT process improvements; linking business & IT strategies and plans. In 2010, Gartner expects the top three to be improving IT governance; linking business & IT strategies and plans; and implementing IT process improvements. He said that technologies that are front of CIO mindset are virtualisation, Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. By 2013, the top three priorities will be delivering projects that enhance mission; leading enterprise change initiatives; and developing/managing a flexible infrastructure.

McDonald concluded: “The emphasis in this recession has been to keep skills and IT people on board in preparation for recovery rather than slash and burn. The approach has been far more strategic than previously, with the emphasis on renegotiating contracts, freezing salaries rather than making job cuts.”