The survey of 1440 global respondents, including 350 CIOs from the Asia Pacific region, found while global IT budgets have increased 2.9 percent (not including inflation), local business is spending 3.3 percent more on IT with the larger players raising the bar by 4.5 percent.

Gartner's head of executive program research, Mark McDonald, said the results show IT departments today are seen as critical business drivers with innovation increasingly player a bigger role. As a results IT budgets and responsibilities are rising.

McDonald said the top three CIO priorities are ensuring IT has adequate funding, is business savvy and can assist in solving problems more quickly.

"The notion of IT driving business growth has risen in priority over the last few years from number 18 to number one," he said.

"It would be easy to view these forces as creating the pretext for cutting IT budgets, however leading CIOs are taking the opportunity to change the conversation away from managing IT costs to increasing the yield on IT investments."