IT Leaders Feeling Less Secure

Security, business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI), respectively, top the list of priorities for leading information management executives, according to a recent survey. During its SIMposium conference, taking place the week of Sept. 13, the Society for Information Management (SIM) revealed a survey of 300 CEOs, CIOs and other executives regarding their top IT projects. Following the top three, their concerns were Web services, customer portals and data synchronization. Aligning IT strategies and business goals was their No. 1 concern. "This demonstrates how quickly the IT world has changed in the last year," says Jerry Luftman, who conducted the survey and is executive director of the graduate IS program at Stevens Institute of Technology. "Four of the top six categories -- security technologies, BPM, customer portals and data synchronization -- were not even in the top 10 last year." According to SIM, security technology took the top spot because of increasing invasive elements such as spam, viruses, spyware and adware.