With CIO budgets heading for their 11th consecutive year of growing at 3% or less, it’s time to offer up some sacred cows for sacrifice. Ken McGee of Gartner has some suggestions and you can read about them in Michael Cooney’s article “Gartner: 16 long-held IT business practices you need to kill” on Network World.

At a recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo session, McGee outlined a number of ways IT can get out of its comfort zone and look for new ways to handle the explosion of information, collaboration and mobility. “IT needs to free up time money and resources to get into this brave new world,” said McGee, Gartner’s vice president and research analyst.

McGee offered 16 IT business practices that need to be killed. “You may not need all 16 but maybe one would get you pointed in the right direction,” he said. The short list of targeted items includes:

1. Stop recommending mega projects
2. Eliminate differences between CIO/CEO projects
3. Terminate projects that do not improve the income statement
4. Abandon CIO priorities that don’t support CEO priorities
5. Stop recommending mega projects part II: instead of requesting wholesale funding for “business applications” or the “technical infrastructure,” state in clear, concise and nonthreatening terms the consequences of austere funding.
6. Terminate existing apps that don’t yield measurable business value
7. End the practice of putting the enterprise IT spending within the CIO budget
8. Abolish environment of little or no IT spending accountability
9. Eliminate IT caused business model disruption surprises
10. Kill cloud-a-phobia
11. Abandon level 1,2,3 tech support
12. Kill chargeback systems
13. Stop issuing competitive bids
14. Stop holding onto unfunded projects. Stop IT hoarders
15. End discrimination against behavioral skills around social sciences
16. End unbalanced support between back and front office

McGee goes on to expand on this list with facts and suggestions from Gartner research regarding applications, IT’s operations and CEO/CIO issues. Read more about them here.