I found a trip to this year’s Channel Expo at the NEC extremely useful for assessing how the credit crunch is biting the IT and Telecoms industry. In particular Tiffani Bova, from Gartner, gave us all some excellent insight into the priorities of CIOs. As you may expect in the current environment, cutting costs is the big priority for 70% of the CIOs researched back at the start of the year, but I think it’s a little worrying that only 50% said that growing sales revenues was important and that was the lowest answer. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether those few companies come out of the recession the strongest?

Tiffani’s slide on how CIOs intend to build value from their existing infrastructure was extremely useful particularly the growing interest in collaboration and virtualization. We are interested in these subjects from two perspectives – 1) helping clients move their business towards cloud computing with a stronger interface online and 2) putting some of the theories into practice for the communication services we offer. We want to move away from a project by project costing model into providing recurring services that help our customers generate leads and convert business online.

I am also interested in developing the idea of a completely virtual organisation and the presentation just spurned me on to consider it a little more deeply … imagine really low (read ‘no’) office overheads and totally outsourced services and a completely mobile dynamic workforce, who meet only when they need to and spend the whole time constructively meeting customers, working in peace, networking with peers in the real world and the virtual and developing their own skills! But I need to develop that idea quite a bit further before I can start convincing people it’s the way forward for communications agencies! More to come on that subject from me soon!