The 2018 SIM IT Issues and Trends Study

This article presents the findings of the Society for Information Management’s 38th Anniversary IT Trends Study, with responses from IT executives in 793 organizations, including 495 CIOs. Positive trends endure, with IT budgets, salaries, hiring, and CIO time spent in the C-suite all up. The top five IT investments in 2018 were Analytics, Cybersecurity, Cloud, Software Development & Maintenance and ERP. CIOs’ top five most “worrisome” management issues were Cybersecurity, Talent, Perception of IT Leadership, Business-IT Alignment, and Business Continuity. Over 80% of CIOs came from other organizations and the percentage with non-IT backgrounds has more than tripled in 36 months to 26.3%. The CIO job is increasingly complex and arguably the most challenging in any organization