On an average, enterprises realize only 43 percent of technology's business potential. That number has to grow for IT to remain relevant in an increasingly digital world. Over the last 18 months, digital technologies; including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud have reached a tipping point with business executives. There is no choice but to increase technology's potential in the enterprise, and this means evolving IT's strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as CIOs expect their 2013 IT budgets to be essentially flat for fifth straight year says a global survey of CIOs by Gartner.

CIO IT budgets have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bust of 2002. For 2013, CIO IT budgets are projected to be slightly down, with a weighted global average decline of 0.5 percent.

Digital technologies will dominate CIO technology priorities for 2013. The top 10 global technology priorities revealed reflect a greater emphasis on externally oriented digital technologies, as opposed to traditional IT/operationally oriented systems
CIOs see these technologies as disrupting business fundamentally over the next 10 years.

70 percent of CIOs cited that mobile technologies would be the most disruptive, followed by big data/analytics at 55 percent, social media at 54 percent and public cloud at 51 percent. The disruptiveness of each of these technologies is real, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination, rather than in isolation.

Demands have increased in a world that has grown dynamic and digital. The harder CIOs work tended to current concerns, the less relevant IT became. CIOs know that the future rests in not repeating the past but in extending IT by hunting and harvesting in a digital world.