Gartner has identified six time-wasting practices that CIOs should avoid in order to focus on key priorities and maximise their value to the business.

Gartner advises CIOs to:

Stop being the budget-priority police - Ensure that your IT organisation minimises boundary disputes when business units use technology, particularly if business units have control over discretionary spending.

Stop using enterprise architecture as a command and control tool - Don’t use architecture to control priorities and direct details of business applications; rather, use it to enable coherence.

Stop communicating using IT metrics; focus on business performance - The focus should be on a manageable number of IT value indicators that are meaningful to business leaders.

Stop the proliferation of applications, infrastructure and IT governance committees - In order to fix the problem of ill-disciplined enterprise decision making, create and repeatedly exploit a strategic portfolio of applications and infrastructure capabilities, with associated rationalisation of IT governance.

Stop defining services in technical rather than business terms - Simplify the number of services offered, bundle them into a logical group and describe services so they reflect user-based activities or processes.

Stop wasting time apologising for past problems – Repeated apologies diminish credibility, which requires being politically smart, integrating IT objectives with enterprise objectives and anticipating business needs to deploy a predictable stream of technology that enables business solutions.