Digitization without innovation?

This year, CIOs in German-speaking countries are spending less money on innovation: Not only is the budget for redesigning and replacing IT falling from 20.9 percent to 16.6 percent, but spending on evaluating innovations is also down (2015: 9.1 percent, 2016 budget: 7.8 percent).

The decline is surprising in view of the fact that 52.3% of CIOs say that expanding digitalization is one of their most important goals this year. However, they are apparently focusing less on innovation at the moment, but are instead approaching digitalization by networking information and processes and analysing their data. This is shown by the correlation with the increase in big data usage.

Digitization lacks skilled workers

However, digitalization is also causing problems for more and more CIOs (2015: 41.0%, 2016: 60.3%). The biggest hurdle is still the lack of qualified employees, particularly for Internet of Things technologies, big data analytics and mobile technologies.

In addition, despite good support from top management, overarching planning is lacking in many cases. Inflexible business processes and rigid organizational structures also cause problems.

More big data

Digitalization is also reflected in the increasing use of big data. In the meantime, 15.9% of participants operate several applications (previous year: 11.0%) and 8.0% operate one system (previous year: 8.8%).

As in the previous year, financial service providers are leading the way in the use of big data. However, the manufacturing industry and the automotive industry are catching up. The vast majority realize their projects in collaboration with external partners (85%).

Top: Security

Application portfolio rationalization, privacy by design, BYOx security, security automation and cloud security occupy the first places on the list of the top technologies of the year. Although four of the top five topics are related to security, the importance of IT security has fallen overall.

The extremely high value of the previous year was not reached again, which is due to both the subjective perception of the threat situation and the increasing maturity of security solutions. The flops of the year are mobile payment, mobile services for vehicles, wearables, robotic process automation and gamification.