“My data is a mess.”

Unfortunately, this is a familiar refrain from CIOs that has echoed through the round tables and panel discussions I’ve either moderated or attended over the past two years.

We all know the problems. Data is:

• Scattered
• Unstructured
• Growing faster than Britney Spears’ Twitter followers list

It’s also essential to competitive advantage. And CIOs get it. With the release of IBM’s Global CIO Study 2009, titled “The New Voice of the CIO,” information, data, business intelligence take center stage as the lifeblood of organizations and the top priority for CIOs.

Largest CIO Survey
The survey of more than 2,500 global CIOs, billed as “the largest face-to-face survey of CIOs ever conducted,” reinforces and validates a trend we’ve been chronicling at CIO magazine: the longtime goal for CIOs to serve as strategic partners to their business counterparts is becoming a reality.

This jibes nicely with what we’ve seen in our annual “State of the CIO” survey – a growing percentage of CIOs view themselves as “Business Strategists,” rather than “Functional IT head.”

BI & Analytics Top List
What’s interesting about the IBM study, though, is the “Ascent of Information” into a clearly articulated top priority for CIOs: “A staggering 83 percent of the survey respondents identified business intelligence and analytics as the way they will enhance their organizations competitiveness.” 

So, yeah, CIOs have to make sure that data is not only safe, secure, available and actionable, but they’ve got be out in front of the line-of-business managers’ requests for tools and processes to wring the most value out of that data.  And here’s where it gets interesting: when we talk about “strategy” and CIOs, we inevitably have to talk about “keeping the lights on” versus “innovation,” like it’s impossible to do both.

You Get It!
I think we need to give CIOs more credit. I mean, whose job isn’t multifaceted? CIOs at midsize companies, I’m looking at you.

Included in the survey were close to 160 CIOs at midsize organizations, who, one could argue, are leading the way. Says IBM’s spokesperson for the study, Tim Willeford, “Not only are a higher percentage of midsize company CIOs members of their company’s senior management team (50 percent versus 33 percent of their colleagues at larger organizations), they are also more likely to use their position to cast IT as an enabler of business innovation (68 percent versus 55 percent).”

No Excuse
“My data is a mess” becomes now just a starting point, not an excuse. More and more CIOs get it.

Check out the study, podcasts and video interviews at www.ibm.com/ciostudy. And take advantage and ask our IBM expert, IBM midmarket GM Marc Dupaquier, for his insights on the CIO study, and how you can put all that messy data to work.