Worst. Year. Ever.

Gartner has made it official: 2009 was the “worst year ever” for IT. I’m here at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando and about 15 minutes into the opening “parade of analysts” keynote yesterday, I was really hoping the Disney location would lighten the mood a tad but the Halloween nightmare continued for a while.

The only wealth evident was the amount of statistics that point to IT hurting for another few years—Gartner predicts it will take until 2012 for broad IT spending levels to equal 2008. As a result, infrastructure upgrades are being delayed (think servers, PCs, printers) to create another source of risk. And don’t forget that “trust” in the business is at an all-time low.

Some much needed genuine humor—in contrast to the creepy, awkward laughter of Windows 7 launch party propaganda—came in the form of VP and Gartner Fellow, Andy Kyte. While his message was serious— “You all have a bloated application portfolio”—his analogy was priceless. IT and the business prefer to be in the mode of making babies (new apps) but are not into responsible parenting. That’s why there are so many orphaned applications that were only funded to be birthed, but not cared for and raised to maturity. Mr. Kyte’s direction to this audience of “the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives:

“Make every application a wanted application.”

The morning keynote wrapped up with less doom and some good points of the inevitability of social media (start harnessing it and spend less time trying to kill it). All-in-all, the morning was a solid reminder of the reality of the IT marketplace in general.

Drilling into IT operations management topics today provided some points about what CIOs are doing and should do to get through the gloom. Starting with CIO priorities based on survey data, 2009 looks like this:

1. Linking business and IT strategies and plans
2. Reducing the cost of IT
3. Delivering projects that enable business growth
4. Improving IT governance
5. Implementing IT process improvements
6. Improving the quality of IS services

The 4^th, 5^th and 6^th priorities are very related to the 2^nd, so it becomes clear to see why the IT operations management segment, which includes network and applications performance management, are among the healthiest sectors in IT.  One way to think about it is that the cost savings need to be tempered with some sanity (automation and process) so application and service delivery are not overly compromised. With more dependence on the network and IT in general, the cost of downtime and poor application performance continues to rise.

None of that is surprising, but what I found interesting is the variability when you look at the changes in priorities over the years. For example, just last year reducing cost was all the way down at #10 on the list. Looking at 2012 predictions, the cost issue dives back down to #6 with the underpinning priorities (governance, process and quality) at the bottom of the list. In 2012, “leading enterprise change initiatives” rockets up the chart from #13 today to #3.

So the take away is that CIOs think they can hold the rudder steady for a few years, institute some much needed process maturity, and then be in position to contribute more back to the business.