Bucharest, Romania: 70% of Romania largest companies’ CIOs reported 10% or more increase of their 2006 budget in comparison with 2005. According to “Romanian CIO Agenda”, the annual CIO Survey for 2007, business budgets growth is expected to continue, but IT budgets increase is expected to slow down.

The “Romanian CIO Agenda” survey is based on answers from 21 top IT executives. The respondents managed an aggregated 2006 IT budgets of EURO 220 millions and their companies have and aggregated revenues of EURO 15 billion EURO.

The survey finds that Romanian top IT executives have bigger budgets, but with pressures to contribute more to enterprise growth and effectiveness.

According to the study the top CIO business priorities for 2006 are to improve business processes (top priority for 62% of CIOs); to attract, retain and grow customer relationships (selected by 48%) and to improve enterprise competitiveness (selected by 43%).

According to the survey the 2006 technology priorities will be: business intelligence applications (BI), business process management (BMP) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) upgrades. 62% of CIOs selected BI, 57% selected BMP, and 48% selected ERP. Very close to the top three is customer relationship management (CRM) with 43%.

For the 2007 and 2009, the trends continue but the survey makes an interesting reading, most notably regarding the need for revenue growth [that raises to second place in 2007] and faster innovation, shorter product/service cycles, [that raises to third place for 2009]. In 2009 technology priorities raises corporate performance management (CPM) to first place.

About CIO Council: CIO Council Romania is the only industry association representing the interests of corporate IT clients. Members are top IT executives from major companies like British American Tobacco, CEC, ALRO, ING Bank, National Bank of Romania, Nestle, Pepsi, Petrom, Posta Romana, Raiffeisen Bank, Rompetrol, Romtelecom, Selgros, Shell Gas, Tuborg, Vodafone Romania.

The main objective of CIO Council is to promote and protect interests of IT&C corporate clients.

CIO Council will address the challenges that CIOs face professionally, including the creation and use of IT&C to achieve our companies’ business objectives, the development of technically capable staff, and the promotion of IT&C as a resource in Romania.

The Change Formula has been stated in a variety of ways by several writers on change. One of these writers, Michael Beer, in “Organizational Change and Development” expressed it as follows:

“The difficulty of creating readiness for change, may be thought of in terms of the cost of changing to organizational members. Change will occur only when these costs are outweighed by a number of factors which can create positive motivation to change. This relationship between positive forces which support change, and the cost of change, may be expressed in the following change formula.

Ch = D x M x P > C

Where:
Ch = Change
D = Dissatisfaction with the status quo
M = A new model for managing or organizing
P = A planned process for managing change
C = Cost of change to individuals and groups

The article presents another view on the change. One should take care of “vision”, “process”, and “discomfort”. I personally prefer the process view: “unfroze-move-refroze”. It allows me to view the change as a living process to as a “frozen” formula.