Long Range IT Strategy Top Concern

A recent Gartner Group study found that the top three management issues for IT directors include long-range IT strategy, recruiting and retaining staff and meeting service levels. End users noted that aligning long range IT strategy to meet evolving business plans was a major issue of over 70% of respondents.

The study also looked at projects within the financial institution that may have felt their budgets squeezed due to the Y2k issue. However, financial institutions seem ready to increase spending in several of these areas. The top project that was impacted by Y2k spending was work on Internet and intranet applications. Then, tying for second, was data warehousing or decision support and electronic commerce. Infrastructure migration, sales force automation, customer relationship management, knowledge management and security followed.

The information was gathered by surveying 62 financial institutions in the securities, banking and insurance arena. Some of the responding institutions include E*Trade, American Express Financial Advisors, Citigroup Securities and Merrill Lynch.