The 2020 SIM IT Issues and Trends Study

These are the findings of the Society for Information Management's 40th Anniversary IT Issues and Trends Study, with responses from 1,005 IT executives, including 345 CIOs and 624 unique organizations. The average revenue of participating organizations was $5.4 billion (median $420 million). IT spending, as a percentage of revenue, was 6.9%, the highest figure in ten years and 27% higher than in 2019. Average IT spending in 2020 was $372.6 million. The percentage of organizations decreasing IT spending more than doubled. Most reported increases in both head count and employee salaries, which were, however, less than in recent years. These and many other findings were likely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The top five IT management issues in 2020 were Cybersecurity, Alignment of IT with the Business, Data Analytics, Digital Transformation, and Compliance & Regulations, unchanged from 2019. The top five largest IT investments were also largely unchanged: Cloud Computing, Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, Application Development and CRM. Use of cloud services continued to increase, almost doubling in the last five years, and cybersecurity continues to be a concern. The most common criteria for assessing CIO performance were User Satis -faction (Internal), Value of IT to the Business, Contribution of IT to Strategy, IT Cost Control and Cybersecurity. The average tenure of CIOs remains a little over six years, with almost 47% reporting to the CEO and over 26% to the CFO, the former down and the latter up since 2019. Continuing trends are for CIOs to come from outside the organization (now over 80%) and from non-IT positions (now nearly a quarter). suc-cessfully.¹