Gartner Identifies Actions That IT Leaders Must Complete Within Three Years to Demonstrate Value to the Overall Business; Gartner Analysts Examine the Future Direction of IT During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, May 14-18, in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2006--For the fourth year in a row, IT budgets will grow less than 3 percent over the previous year, according to Gartner, Inc. With such lackluster growth levels, chief information officers (CIOs) must adopt new strategies that constantly reinforce the merits of maintaining an IT staff.

"The next three years will place an extraordinary amount of pressure on IT organizations challenged to continually show members of the entire enterprise that they deliver value sufficient to warrant remaining an intact organization," said Kenneth McGee, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "To do this, IT executives must do more than just cut costs. They must deliver value that is measurable and of significant importance to the enterprise."

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through May 18, Mr. McGee identified nine initiatives that IT leaders must complete within three years to demonstrate IT's business value to the organization.

CIOs need to establish a track record of creating value faster than reducing IT costs by 2009. CIOs are now expected to provide high-quality, secure and cost-effective services. CIOs must deliver a record of high performance to establish their position and contribution in the organization. To do this, CIOs will need to create business value faster than the market and technology can reduce IT and business costs.

Complete Automation of IT Operational Processes by 2009. Using a layered technique, IT groups can determine where process automation products fit in with the synchronization of infrastructure resources with business needs. A new generation of configuration management vendors is creating tools to operate in multi-vendor environments and bringing rigorous change management and audit capabilities to configuration management.

Attain "Corrective Phase" Security Status by 2008. Once a consistent security vision and strategy have been accepted among business executives, the IT organization can initiate a strategic information program. During this corrective phase, security and risk governance processes and structures are revamped, and other organizational actions are initiated. Steps should also be taken to develop and evolve a strategic information security architecture.

Create a Business Intelligence Competency Center by 2008. Today, leading business intelligence and performance management initiatives are interactive, flexible processes that begin with the business objectives, the needs and skills of people within the company, and the critical business processes. Then they incorporate the technology that best serves those needs. The key to integrating these elements is the business intelligence and performance management competency center (BICC), which consists of people from the business areas of the company, as well as the company's IT "gurus", working together to drive the appropriate business intelligence evolution.

Apply a "Multisourcing" Discipline to All Sourcing Arrangements by 2009. Most organizations are ill-prepared to move toward multisourcing and the discipline that is required. Companies must move toward a new era of value chains to serve clients and operate businesses. Organizations must evolve multisourcing as a core management discipline. The combined forces of core-competence focus, IT, communications, globalization and hyper-competition will not allow companies to maintain their practices.

Operate All Revenue Generating Channels in a Web 2.0 Architecture by 2008. Enterprise architects must act as catalysts that speed the formation of unified business technology strategies and their execution. The enterprise architecture process must shift gears from limiting complexity by limiting choices to accelerating innovation and execution by coordinating complexity through unified business and IT strategy, decentralized execution and loose coupling among all related stakeholder disciplines.

Establish Cross-Project, Enterprise-Level Application Management Before 2009. Enterprises must complete a retooling of their prioritization, budgeting and project definition processes to establish an enterprise-level perspective. Mega-projects must give way to an emphasis on continuous improvement through resource changes, methodology changes and changes in technical architecture that enable higher composition, reuse and integration.

Retire 10 Percent of Your Applications by 2008. Most companies have no standard process for retiring applications and the associated technical or operational resources. As a result, organizations manage a large number "orphaned" applications that provide little or no functional business value, yet increase complexity, consumer budgets and degrade performance in the overall IT and operational environment. A clean sweep effort to retire orphaned applications will benefit IT organizations and the owning business units.

Reinsert People Into All Customer-Facing Business Processes by 2008. Companies should analyze all customer facing business processes. Particular attention should be paid to elements within a customer-facing process where revenue may be generated or lost, based on how well or poorly customers perceive they are being treated by identifying when human interaction will increase the likelihood of a sale or reduce the likelihood of losing a customer. A likely area of business process change will be to significantly alter current customer care processes that are heavily dependent on IT-based self-service solutions and to increase degrees of human interaction.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises, Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of their annual planning efforts. Attendees rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

In San Francisco, an integral part of the Gartner Symposium is the ITxpo showfloor, where more than 150 technology companies are showcasing the latest technology solutions. There are nine ITxpo marketplaces, including business applications and BPM, business intelligence and data warehousing, outsourcing and IT services and security. ITxpo marketplaces are focused areas designed to aggregate solution providers into a specific market and link conference topics to market solutions. Attendees can attend technology company presentations and schedule face to face meetings with exhibitors of their choice. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/symposium/us.

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. Gartner serves 10,000 organizations, including chief information officers and other senior IT executives in corporations and government agencies, as well as technology companies and the investment community. The Company consists of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 3,700 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 75 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.