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New Year's resolutions always remind me of IT projects: They have a wretched yet well-deserved reputation for failure. My theory is that we fritter away so many of our annual resolutions because we make them in a vacuum, with only ourselves involved. So I'm up for something new in 2006, something that involves you, too.
I propose a group resolution to make the voice of the midmarket CIO heard loudly and clearly by those in our industry. So my first action item is the launch of the CIO Decisions Midmarket Leadership Awards program to honor outstanding IT and business executives. We want to celebrate the people who are making resourceful or cost-effective use of technology to advance the success of their enterprises.
Your first action item is to think about the leaders you know -- yourself included -- and nominate someone. To qualify, nominees must hold a current position as a senior IT or business executive and work in companies with $50 million to $2 billion in annual revenues. We also welcome nonprofits and governmental organizations with operating budgets in the same range. Most important, nominees must have delivered on at least one major IT initiative with demonstrable business value during the past two years. We'll gather nominations through March 1 and announce the winners in June at the CIO Decisions Conference in Carlsbad, Calif. We'll profile some of these leaders in our July 2006 issue as well.
Establishing a voice for the midmarket CIO also calls for greater understanding of who you are and what you want to accomplish. As this month's CIO Habitat demonstrates, you are a research-driven crowd, so we've done some quantitative questioning of our own. A few weeks ago, we reviewed more than 200 of your responses to our second readership study. Along with great suggestions for future stories, we learned more about you, such as the following:
Your company size. Nearly 40% of you work at companies with annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion -- widely considered to be the classic midmarket range -- while one-fifth of our readers come from bigger companies in the $1 billion-plus category. About 12% of you hail from companies with revenue between $50 million and $100 million.
Your budget ranges. At the top end of the range, 20% of our readers work with $10 million to $50 million annually. Some 25% of you fall into the range of $1 million to $5 million, and 15% spend $5 million to $10 million on IT. At the most frugal end of the spectrum, about 18% have IT budgets of less than $1 million.
Your IT spending plans. One-fourth of you anticipate healthy IT budget growth of 5% to 10% this year, while 12% of you expect spending increases of more than 10%. The majority (44%) plan to hold steady at 2005 spending levels, and only 10% will actually cut spending.
The topics that interest you most begin with IT/business alignment, security and compliance, then branch out to infrastructure planning and growth, enterprise software projects, and staffing concerns. "I like the real-life stories," one reader told us. "It gives me the opportunity to compare with our peers." You'll find more of those peer stories in this issue, and we promise many more to come.
Happy New Year!
Maryfran Johnson, is the founding editor in chief of CIO Decisions. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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