Tell us your tech priorities for a chance to win $500

Certain CIOs, mainly those who have come up through the business side, have been known to say, “Technology doesn’t matter; it’s all about business value.”

Good luck with that. Sure, it’s a given that no one does technology for technology’s sake. But valuable new tech is emerging at an unprecedented pace — much of it open source or cloud-based with a low cost of entry. I can think of several new technologies in the cloud and app dev spaces alone that are game changers and can vastly shorten the path to business value.

[ Take InfoWorld’s Navigating IT survey for a chance to win $500. | See InfoWorld’s guide to today’s best tech with the “2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” ]

Sorting through and understanding that new technology is hard work. But that’s what being a technology professional is about, and helping you get there is No. 1 in InfoWorld’s job description. That’s why I’m asking you to fill out our annual Navigating IT survey: Your responses help guide us toward the technologies you’d like our expert contributors to unpack and evaluate. As a bonus, you’ll automatically be entered to win a $500 prize.

It’s rare to have so much change in so many different areas. For example, in last year’s survey, we saw application development rise significantly as an investment priority. Those results point to the reality that, increasingly, we’re living in a software-defined world where the developer is king. Not just the explosion in mobile apps, but whole new vistas ranging from big data to home entertainment to intelligent cars to the Internet of things are driving the demand for skilled developers to crazy levels.

Take storage as another example. For years, enterprise storage was a comparatively sleepy area, centering almost exclusively on the stable, reliable SAN. Today, a slew of disruptive technologies and architectures are shaking things up: object storage, converged storage, and cloud storage to name a few. The SAN is now considered a bottleneck in many applications, as the trend toward increasingly innovative uses of server-based flash storage accelerates.

All in all, there’s a baker’s dozen of technology categories in the survey, but the survey branches, so you need answer questions only in those categories that concern you. We put considerable effort into developing the Navigating IT survey, and I’ve heard from several readers who actually felt it helped them clarify their technology investment goals. So give it a whirl. In addition to making yourself eligible for the prize, you’ll also be sent highlights of the results when the survey is completed.

This article, “Tell us your tech priorities for a chance to win $500,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.