The role of the financial services CIO is becoming more and more challenging. The most effective CIOs are increasingly focused on understanding and supporting the goals of the business. This translates into aligning IT expenditures clearly with business objectives, continuously enhancing both effectiveness and efficiency, delivering real value faster, leveraging global sourcing, rapidly adapting to business change and ensuring effective security and controls — all this with a modest budget.

Deloitte's survey report, Running IT as a business, examines the key challenges identified by leading CIOs and provides insight on how their IT organizations can more effectively align operations and strategies with the business.

Overall key findings of the survey:

• IT wants to be a strategic business partner, not just a commodity service provider
  • However, less than half of IT executives and professionals in Canada’s financial services industry are evaluated using performance measures that include business value
• Although IT has made great strides at improving its internal operations, it still has much work to do to achieve its larger goal
  • IT organizations are doing better with producing service offering catalogs but are still too technology-oriented and don’t convey the business benefits
• To reach the next level, IT must align itself with business needs — and earn a seat at the table by running itself more like a business
  • A majority of respondents felt that the best way to improve the return on IT investments is to focus on developing “clear and detailed business requirements” and an “accurate calculation of benefits and value”

 Download the complete report, Running IT as a business