Today is my last day before I take six months leave. I will return to my duties in early September.

Members, in the meantime please, please don’t hesitate to contact members at iia dot ie with your guest blog posts. Check out the guidelines here.Members are also welcome to post all types of content to the main IIA.ie site as well. Read more here.

You can also contact the chairs of the IIA Working Groups who will be seeking blog posts, case studies and speakers in 2010.

Please bear with the IIA over the next couple of weeks as they adjust to my departure…

Harry Goddard, a Partner in IIA Member Company Deloitte, has submitted a guest post below. Deloitte have relesed the results of their recent Chief Information Officer Survey and are interested to hear your thoughts on it. You can leave comments below or on their own site.

We’ve just released the results of our first survey of CIOs and IT managers in Ireland in what we hope is the first in a new series of annual surveys dedicated exclusively to the state of Irish IT. The survey provides some good insights and indicates that, at best, a return to ‘business as usual’ for CIOs and IT departments is still some way off or, more likely, that business as usual is changed for good.

A couple of key findings emerged from the survey – enabling business cost reduction is the number one priority for IT departments through 2010; however, for many organisations, this will be done against a backdrop of falling budgets. It seems also that IT cost reduction has not gone away and the challenge for CIOs and IT managers will be achieving incremental and sustainable IT cost savings beyond what they have achieved in 2009. What also came across loud and clear is that IT needs to deliver value to the business – IT is still not seen as a strategic partner.

We have created a dedicated results Deloitte.

We have a new video widget on the IIA homepage to which we invite members to submit YouTube videos. I created this video just before Christmas in order to show off the space. Happily it has been replaced since! I’d love to update this on a regular basis so please do email your YouTube URLs to members@iia.ie and we’d be happy to showcase yours.

FYI nothing fancy involved in creating the above video either: some stock photographs from IStockphoto.com, some podsafe music from PodShow.com all mushed together in Windows Movie Maker which comes with Windows Vista. See comments on previous post to read more about what other people use for quick and dirty videos or please add your own comments about software and hardware you use for video creation.

The end of 2008 is looming and we are doing a bit of navel gazing here in IIA HQ. Navels are all very well for gazing at but they’re a bit low on useful information. All of you however have lots of information about our events in your pretty little noggins and we want it!

We’ve prepared a survey about our events where we ask you about what you liked about last year’s events, what you didn’t like, what kind of events you would like to see next year and we also ask your opinion on some specific aspects of our programme. So fill out the survey please – it’ll only take five minutes!