By 2014, CIOs will have lost control of 25% of IT spending to the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), predicts Gartner. But that's not all - things seem to get scarier (from the perspective of the IT guys at least). By 2017, the research firm estimates that CMOs will have a larger IT budget than the CIOs.

These stats and other trends were shared by Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Global Research, Gartner, at the firm's three-day Symposium/IT Expo 2011 being held in Mumbai.

“The landscape is changing fast since many CIOs who are purely with technical background and don’t have any financial or business background don’t become business leaders. So the top management is allotting IT budgets to the CMOs in several medium-size organizations. The vendors and service providers are already talking to the CMOs and not the CIOs in such organizations,” he said.

“It is OK with CIOs who feel that finally, someone else will be taking care of the IT budgets and talking to the vendors and service providers but certainly not for those who feel shaky that someone else
would be taking charge of the budget,” he added.

Partha Iyengar, Vice President and Analyst, Gartner, revealed that this is yet to happen in India. But that should be little consolation to the CIOs here. Being a global phenomenon, this trend is most likely to happen in India as well, said Iyengar.

So here's a word of caution to the IT managers, the next-level CIOs: besides keeping themselves updated on various technologies, they also need to get into the nuances of how business and IT align together in an organization.