As is customary with each year’s survey, the list of CIO priorities contains interesting changes. Interesting due to this year’s list contains both current and past priorities. 

Analytics and business intelligence will be the top technology priorities for CIOs this year, according to Gartner Inc.'s annual survey of IT executives. The second most important technology in the survey is mobile.

Gartner asked 2,335 global CIOs about their business and technology priorities for the year ahead. The CIOs, who were surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2011, control $321 billion worth of IT spending in 45 countries.

Here's the list, along with information on where the topic was ranked last year.

1. Analytics and business intelligence. (Last year's rank: 5)
2. Mobile technologies. (Last year: 3)
3. Cloud computing, including SaaS. (Last year: 1)
4. Collaboration/workflow technologies. (Last year: 8)
5. Legacy modernization.
6. IT management. (Last year: 4)
7. CRM
8. ERP applications
9. Security
10. Virtualization. (Last year: 2)

The survey also looked at business priorities and ranked them as well. From last year to this year, there was no change in the top three priorities: Increasing enterprise growth was first, followed by attracting and retaining new customers, followed in third place by reducing costs.

"Present economic conditions may tempt CIOs to force IT back into cost-cutting mode, but senior executives expect technology -- and this includes IT -- to address the tough challenges by amplifying enterprise strategies and operations," said Gartner analyst Mark McDonald, in a statement.

Last year's survey by Gartner found that CIOs felt they were losing control of IT spending to CFOs. As art of this trend, we also see IT budget creation moving away from a percentage of revenue to a business based (project) approval process.