Top 10 Priorities of CIO’s
Posted by Kelley Lear on Jan 4, 2011 | 0 comments
While doing webinars and/or while working with client corporate tax departments, I am typically asked a plethora of questions about how tax can develop a better working relationship with IT. They share horror stories about how they do not get support and how it takes forever to get any assistance from IT. I am also asked how other companies go about getting budget for IT projects related to helping the tax department. Most often tax is the on the very end of the line with respect to budget priorities. They are sometimes viewed as a cost center and not contributing to the top line of the corporation. Therefore, they may not be able to obtain much budget, if any at all. In addition, since tax personnel are extremely adept at cranking out tons of work and dealing with less than ideal data and manual processes, they always deliver…so, the pain is only felt by tax.
I am going to write several blog posts on this topic and see if I can also get some further insight from other tax department and IT professionals, in an attempt to shed some practical light on things you can do right away this year to make this a year for change. I would like to share some thoughts on how you can begin to build relationships, and either obtain budget now, or at the very least secure budget for next year!
I would contend that one of the first things that tax professionals need to do is to learn a bit more about their colleagues in the IT profession, and even more importantly, learn about what your CIO truly cares about. In this way, you will be able to determine how what you do or what you need, could align with their goals and concerns. Knowledge is power!
Here are some of the latest industry findings and rankings for CIO Priorities for 2011 as it relates to Technologies, Applications and Tools (Sources: combination of thinking from CIO.com, the Big Fat Finance Blog and the NASCIO)
1. Virtualization (servers, storage, computing, data center)
2. Cloud computing (software as a service, infrastructure, applications, storage)
3. Networking (voice and data communications, unified communications)
4. Legacy application modernization / renovation
5. Identity and access management (managing user profiles and logins)
6. Document/Content/Records/E-mail management (active, repository, archiving,
digital preservation)
7. Security enhancement tools
8. Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics applications
9. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
10. Social media and networking (Web 2.0 services, wikis, blogs, collaboration
technologies, and social networking)
There’s no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and working with the people who can make a difference. They get the benefit of your participation and you gain a direct understanding of the real problems and potential solutions, which makes you a more informed giver. Michael Milken
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