We’ll be running our annual CIO Survey again this year (RSS readers will also see that we’ve created a CIO Survey tag). This is a unique survey: it surveys an international group of CIOs and other senior buyers of enterprise-scale high technology solutions. We gave an outline of the methodology in 2005. Last year firms were able to use the findings of the CIO Survey to avoid some horrific analyst relations errors.

We’ve been surveying IT buyers since 2002, and have build up an interesting pattern of consistent data by asking the same questions in the same way. Our approach involves large random samples, in order to cover a wide range of industries. We segment these CIOs into the same industry and technology categories each year (in contrast to those who consider segmentation to be a dark art). These stable methods allow us to avoid the sort of issues that, for example, Techtel had.

Our survey balances its sample in each major market so that we can see the major differences in influence at the national level: France is not like Germany or Britain. We’re not getting 80% of our data from one country, as Techtel did. We’re also making sure that we survey outside the subsidiaries of multinationals by using interviewers who speak the native languages of the countries involved.

To find out more about the survey, give us a call.