Annual Technology Trends and Benchmark Study

From Cloud, Mobile, Social, IoT and Analytics to Digitization and Cybersecurity

Benchmarking Priorities for Today’s Technology Leaders

A decade ago, a leading analyst firm chided chief information officers for spending 80 percent of their budgets on running and maintaining the business, noting that such an allocation was “dead money.” More needed to be invested in growing the business. Since then, IT functions have made stunning progress, bringing lights-on investments down to 55 percent of their current budgets, according to Protiviti’s annual survey of technology leaders. Yet organizations still may not be investing enough in innovation at the expense of compliance, security and maintenance. At the same time, considering the greater impact of technology disruptors in the form of digitization to harvest new sources of value through business model innovation and improve collaboration between IT and the core business, more progress is needed to mature the performance of security and privacy capabilities across the enterprise.

The results of our survey magnify the current state of operations, challenges and competing priorities in IT functions throughout all industries. Our notable findings:

Cloud computing adoption is accelerating rapidly.
Digitization investments are on the rise.
IT transformation projects abound, but there are hurdles.
Data and analytics are advancing.
While technology budgets are increasing, investments in innovation may not be sufficient.
Cybersecurity issues remain top-of-mind for executives, though investments may not be measured properly in terms of performance.