Study: Don't Know tops IT's to-do list

Editor's note: The following story is from InfoWorld's 2008 April Fool’s spoof-news feature package. It is not true. Enjoy!

Organizations seeking to leverage cutting-edge technology in service of business goals, look no further: Don't Know is fast shaping up as the long-sought-after paradigm shift to competitive advantage, one that has tech departments across all sectors scrambling to implement Don't Know into every facet of the enterprise.

According to a survey of 473 CIOs conducted by Tech Biz Currents, nearly two in three tech execs are working hard to capitalize on the increasingly attractive value proposition of Don't Know, rounding out their IT road maps with Don't Know implementations in nearly every corner of the tech landscape, from networking to security to storage and beyond -- even among project management initiatives, long viewed as the last likely entrant in the burgeoning Don't Know game.

"Inklings of the trend cropped up in previous years, especially in cutting-edge areas like Enterprise 2.0," said Art Bergson, senior analyst at Tech Biz Currents and co-author of the survey. "But this year's results are tantamount to mandate: Don't Know is the fast track to tomorrow's agile enterprise -- and an essential component of any tech execs' arsenal for bringing about companywide, competitive-minded change."

And while less forward-looking colleagues catch up on old-guard projects such as network security, compliance, and the greening of IT, 58 percent of this year's CIOs will ride the Don't Know wave to the kind of competitive advantage last year's forward thinkers reaped from Don't Know social-networking implementations.

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"Today's push to roll out Don't Know is clearly a grassroots movement, one that has reached the corner office from the end-user level on up," said Jeff Richardson, director of future-proof technologies at Tech Biz Currents and co-author of the survey. "After all, it was in the user-centric sphere -- enterprise wikis, blogs, social networking, and folksonomies -- where Don't Know played the most prominent role the past two years we conducted the survey."

The survey, which polled CIOs not only on technical implementations but also staffing decisions, interdepartmental communication, and overall business strategy, uncovered a number of chief hurdles CIOs face in becoming Don't Know agents of change at their organizations -- in particular, a likely shortfall of IT workers fluent in Don't Know technologies and best practices.

"Don't Know will have a significant impact on IT staffing and department morale in the years ahead," Bergson said, pointing out that, on the one hand, Don't Know is without doubt the hottest skill on the IT horizon, with 51 percent of CIOs surveyed seeking to sign Don't Know specialists to their staffs, as compared to the 21 percent seeking project managers and 12 percent hungry for development talent.

And yet, on the other hand, Bergson added, Don't Know tops the list of CIO staffing concerns for the second year running. According to the survey, a full one in two tech execs believe Don't Know will contribute significantly to their inability to fill all open IT positions in the year ahead.