Non-technical work consumes the bulk of CIOs’ time, SIM study finds
CIOs today spend a lot more time managing relationships than diving into technical work. In fact, non-technical work consumes 77% of CIOs’ time, according to new survey data from the Society for Information Management (SIM).
SIM polled CIOs around the country for its annual survey and came up with this breakdown of how CIOs spend their time:
- Architecture: 6%
- Human resources: 7%
- IT governance: 9%
- Non-IT: 7%
- Operations: 12%
- Relationship management with business: 20%
- Relationship management with IT staff: 12%
- Relationship management with vendors: 7%
- Applications development: 5%
- Strategy: 15%
Technical work — architecture, operations, and software development — consumes 23% of CIOs’ time.
Relationship management is a significant time-sink. Roughly half of the time CIOs spend on non-technical work is devoted to managing relationships, either with the business, their own IT staffs, or vendors.
Strategy rates high among the individual tasks, netting 15% of CIOs’ time.
The SIM survey also found IT budgets, salaries and staff turnover rates have returned to pre-recessionary levels; see the full story here.
Other key findings from the 2011 SIM survey:
- Business Intelligence is the top tech investment in 2011, followed by cloud computing, ERP systems, mobile and wireless applications, and CRM;
- 49% of CIOs surveyed report to the CFO and 32% report to the CEO; and
- The average CIO has worked at the same company for 4.45 years.
