Women CIOs: Foresee Higher IT Budgets with Anticipated Risks
Summary:
According to Tina Nunno, vice president of Gartner, “women CIOs expect higher IT budget with anticipation of IT risks than their male counterparts”.
Gartner released data early in the year to show the results of a survey conducted among 2810 CIOs, including 382 women, managing a total IT budget $397 billion in 84 countries. The research company has compared and analyzed their responses. As per the survey, Women CIOS anticipate greater risk and expect an increase in IT budgets higher than their male counterparts. This trend is confirmed for the second consecutive year.
IT budgets up for all by 2015
Women CIOs surveyed by Gartner plan to increase their budget to 2.4% in 2015, while their male counterparts expect an increase of 0.8% only. The reasons for this difference are still unclear (1.6 points in question) but other survey data “shows that women are more concerned with under-investment in IT risk management than men”, explains Editor Tina Nunno, vice president and Gartner Fellow in the Research Group CIO of Stamford, Connecticut. According to her, “Women are more concerned than men by the flap ‘resources’ of the digital equation.
The majority of CIOs – men and women – believes that the digital world creates additional risks to the IT environment. But Women CIOs (79%) are more likely than men (67%) to say that investment in risk management are not adapted to the challenges of today’s security and compliance and to overcome to this scenario they are also significantly more likely to believe that agile methods will better address IT risks.
ISD (Instructional Systems Design) negotiates better with the general direction
The impact of the relationship between IT and other departments on the development of IT budgets is another survey pane. The men say they can get IT budget increase of 2.8% when addressing the general direction of their organization. But they simply expect to maintain budgets when trading interest to other directions (COO, CFO, etc.…). Women CIOs, however, thinks getting higher budgets regardless of the directions with which they trade (3.2% with the finance department and up to 4.2% when the CIO of a unit addresses the Organizational challenges).
The survey results denotes – “women and men CIOs use different approaches to promote the IT value within their organization and do not have the same relationship to the hierarchy. For example, when women CIOSs are for general management, they are more likely than men to highlight the impact of IT on the new present value and cash flow. When directed to the ‘Director of Operations’ (COO), they put more light on the impact of IT on return on investment and productivity. However, the speech of men in the ISD function varies little from one direction to another”, say the analyst.
The top 5 priority technologies
Despite these differences of approach to IT budgets, the 5 priority technologies are the same for men and women CIOs today, namely: analytical solutions, the infrastructure, Cloud business solutions, data centers, ERP and Mobile technologies. “The differences in technological priorities identified in the past were often linked to the fact that men and women CIOs did not work in the same sectors, but these differences have faded with the digitization of economy”, says Tina Nunno.
But women are still poorly represented in IT. And directives of information systems are largely in the minority, however, their number progresses. In 2015, 87 women (17.4%) are CIOs of companies ranking in Fortune 500, when they were 61 in 2012.
“Young women that integrate the area of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are still scarce. In the US, for example, 1 out of 4 workers in the sectors are women. The slow growth in the number of women DSI is also related to how we perceive the leadership promoted in the company, adds the Vice President of Gartner. Based on the stats in the survey, means, we can remain optimistic, the number of women in the sector will increase, as opportunities are numerous and higher wages in other sectors will also play the trump card.
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