McDonald said the report found while the value of IT departments is sometimes questioned, CIOs are using IT to drive business growth through competitive advantage.

Gartner worldwide director of executive program research Andrew Roswell-Jones, said inadequate funding and skilled staff shortages were identified by CIOs as inhibitors to company growth.

He said innovation has a big role to play with business shifting from trial and error projects to structured pilot programs.

"We are seeing IT departments creating innovation projects by forming a hypothesis and trialling it in small market segments," Roswell-Jones said.

"They should look to their own customer data available on hand and formulate campaigns based on real information."