It’s kind of intriguing, in some twisted way, that articles popped up like 8 Gadgets That Will Be Huge in 2010 or that 2009’s 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries includes MIT’s Media Lab.

This past summer, Forrester conducted a series of in-depth interviews of CIOs (as well as some directors of IT planning and finance) to get a better understanding of their roles:  how they see the role in the context of their organizations, how they are evaluated by senior management, their key success imperatives, and their information needs.  We sat down with each of them for an hour to help shape how we support the most senior executives within IT.
 

Are you implementing or considering technologies, such as Social Computing and Cloud-based platforms?  Is IT positioned to exploit these technologies?

by Marc Cecere

Recently, Forrester surveyed a number of CIOs to collect benchmark data on staffing ratios and spending. This is a new initiative within Forrester and one that is not yet complete. We did this for three reasons:

1. Benchmark questions (called inquiries at Forrester) on staffing have become relatively common. Examples are “Can you tell us the average share of IT Staff as a % of total staff by organization size” and “Would you have specific spending figures for IT infrastructure?”. 
2. This kind of data in conjunction with other data and analysis can identify problem areas. 
3. Staffing benchmark data along with spending and other data are objective measures of IT organizations. 

Though our initial sample size is small a preliminary view of the data shows that: