Telstra International, a leading global supplier of managed network and hosting services, today jointly released the findings of the sixth annual “State of the Asian CXO 2011” survey conducted by CIO Asia Magazine with Fairfax Business Media, revealing that the effectiveness of Asian CXOs is being compromised by vicious, systemic short-term management cycles.
Telstra International, a leading global supplier of managed network and hosting services, today jointly released the findings of the sixth annual “State of the Asian CXO 2011” survey conducted by CIO Asia Magazine with Fairfax Business Media, revealing that the effectiveness of Asian CXOs is being compromised by vicious, systemic short-term management cycles.
According to the seven-country wide survey, which included responses from more than 360 Asian CXOs from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, the majority of CXOs recognized that IT can create competitive advantage and enable business innovation. However, their effectiveness is challenged by ongoing cost management and reduction pressure (60.7%), the lack of time for strategic thinking/planning (46.4%), and difficulty in proving the value of IT as well as the inability to meet expectations from the business (45.3%).
Other findings of the 2011 survey results included:
- Top three technology priorities: ‘Business Intelligence’ (47%), ‘Business continuity planning’ (45.9%) and ‘Enterprise IT Security’ (44.2%);
- Top three management priorities: ‘Aligning IT and business goals’ (54.1%), ‘Controlling costs’ (47.0%), and ‘Business continuity/risk management’ (41.5%);
- Top three challenges in the CXO role: ‘Pressure for cost management and reduction’ (60.7%), ’Shortage of time for strategic thinking/planning’ (46.4%), and ‘Difficulty proving the value of IT’ (45.3%);
- Cloud computing priorities: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) received fairly equal rankings by the CXOs in most countries except in India and Indonesia which had SaaS as the top priority and;
- Attitudes towards hosted services: Over 50% of CXOs indicated they have already adopted hosted solutions or are in the process of rolling out such solutions in selected parts of their organizations. However, 31% of CXOs shared that they have no plans for hosted solutions, which suggested some hesitation towards such services.
Telstra International Executive Director Mr Phil Mottram said that with the uncertain economic outlook for 2012 and tight IT budgets, organizations will need to break the cycle of short-term management and turn to selective outsourcing as an IT strategy in order to focus limited resources on core revenue-generating activities.
“By innovating business processes, such as with hosted services and cloud computing services, CXOs can help their businesses stay ahead of the competition, tap new opportunities and grow despite the challenging market conditions,” commented Mr Mottram.
“Business process innovation can help CXOs ensure better alignment of their IT strategies with the business’ priorities. Their first step can be to ensure a network centric ICT infrastructure design to be best placed to take advantage of the benefits of cloud services, shorten time to market new offerings to customers, minimize risks when expanding into new geographies, achieve greater economies of scale, boost business performance and optimize utilization of current assets,” he concluded.
To view the full report please visit www.telstrainternational.com/research-insights/state-of-the-asian-cxo