Women CIOs more positive about analytics and IT budgets: Gartner
According to Gartner's CIO Agenda 2015, female CIOs are significantly more positive about predictive analytics than male CIOs (32 per cent versus 22 per cent) as well as social and multimedia information (19 per cent versus 3 per cent).
Female CIOs are expecting significantly greater budget increases in 2015 compared to their male counterparts (2.4 per cent versus 0.8 per cent), the report also found.
Female respondents were more risk-aware than male CIOs however, being more likely to be pessimistic about risk approaches not keeping up with increasing digital risks (76 per cent versus 67 per cent).
Gartner also found female CIOs are more likely to adapt the metrics they use to prioritise and assess performance and value to their reporting structure, while male CIOs were not.
Of the total respondents, women represented 13.7 per cent (337 women and 2473 men) -- a figure that has remained static for the past 11 years, the report noted.
"While there are more similarities than differences in the responses of men and women, there are also a number of notable differences indicating that female CIOs show more adaptability in their leadership roles than their male counterparts," the report said.
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"Organisations planning to take full advantage of digital must address leadership related to: information and technology, value, and people and culture.
"This gender perspective of the data encourages readers to consider what might happen if we also flipped IT leadership by gender in the new digital world."
The report recommends that CIOs and those who hire and work with them aim to take advantage of gender and diversity to build a digital leadership team.
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This includes building a gender-diverse team to deal with digital risks, and being aware that both gender and reporting structure can be factors in the data a CIO uses to prioritise investments and in data analytics.