CIOs who wish to contribute to their organisation's debate regarding future strategy will first have to win the trust of their business peers and the board in order to get a hearing. And being heard is crucial. CIOs must have a say regarding strategy in order to fully promote the opportunities of technology to the organisation, especially with regard to the technologies needed to support an enterprise operating in real time. By better understanding and contributing to the development of the overall business strategy, the alignment between enterprise architecture and business strategy will improve, which will tease out more value from information systems, which will enhance the credibility of the CIO.

And so the wheel turns.

Ultimately, getting that hearing and support from the business all comes back to track record. Hayward offers the example of a Hong Kong CIO who was preparing a presentation for the board where he intended to argue his case for a significant spend on a rather obscure middleware project. Aware of the board's cynicism regarding IT, the CIO had prepared a lengthy and somewhat arcane presentation. Three slides in, even Hayward was finding it difficult to follow. "And I understand this stuff," he says.

Hayward proposed that the CIO change tack, document the successes of the past to the board, then use that track record to encourage the board's trust regarding further investment. He did and the board signed off on the project.

"It all comes back to credibility," Hayward says.

There is something of the Colosseum about a big Gartner pow-wow: the sensation that a thumbed gesture will seal a technology's success and a vendor's fateBy Beverley HeadAt the conclusion of four days of meetings, seminars, speeches, networking events and workshops come the thumbs up and the thumbs down, the indicators that Gartner believes can help CIOs chart their course over the coming years.

This year they came in the form of a list of 10 predictions presented in a locknote address by Tokyo-based group vice president and head of research for Gartner Asia Pacific and Japan, Craig Baty.

1. Bandwidth becomes more cost-effective than computing.

According to Baty, advances in opto-electronics mean bandwidth will accelerate faster than the speed or the storage of computers themselves. It will, he says, ultimately force a fundamental shift in the cost of achieving a task remotely or locally and prompt CIOs to rethink how they allot computing tasks around a network.

"Previous application design decisions were made to conserve precious network bandwidth, expanding shortened data, processing locally and replicating data to obviate transmission on every use," Baty says, but future breakthroughs may prompt a shift in this thinking. As the cost balance shifts in favour of bandwidth, Baty suggests CIOs will instead consider more ASP-type models for applications, the use of more centralised computing facilities, thin clients and even an exploration of grid-style computing schemes allowing processing to be shifted around a network to follow available cycles.

Gartner Action Item: Consider a shift in the priorities in the enterprise architecture to produce or buy systems that will reflect the future reality of cheap bandwidth.

2. Most major new systems will be inter-enterprise.

Since computer systems first wormed their way into organisations, their major purpose has been to mechanise previously manual internal processes. Gradually that internal-only focus has eroded to the point that organisations link their information systems with those of the banks, with suppliers, with regulators and with customers. Gartner believes this outward-facing evolution will continue. Such systems are, of course, key to development of real-time enterprises.