At its annual Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes, analyst Gartner warned firms that they risk business project failures unless they are able to attract and retain women within their IT departments.

According to Gartner, business is now dominated by globalisation, relationships and collective decision making, all areas better suited to women than men. However, the analyst predicted that 40 percent of female IT workers will have left traditional technology career paths by 2012, instead moving into business, research and development or entrepreneurial roles.

Mark Raskino, research vice-president and Gartner fellow, pointed out that women tend to have strengths in communication, social skills and understanding others’ views.

“A battle of the sexes for the important emerging skills and roles in IT would be healthy, but it’s typically such a male-dominated function that there’s not even an active debate,” Raskino said. “CIOs currently don’t seem to be aware that social networking systems, vendor and portfolio management, collaborative knowledge work and several other areas in IT would benefit from typically female capability traits.”

Also at the event, IT managers were advised to relinquish control of some of their traditional technology responsibilities in order to increase their involvement in business-focused initiatives.

Gartner said that two-thirds of IT budgets are currently taken up by operations, maintenance and support – areas that could be handled by employees to some extent. “Things like search, instant messaging, Skype, podcasting, Wi-Fi, MySpace, YouTube, wikis, peer-to-peer networking and Web 2.0 micro applications have huge potential to radically increase knowledge worker productivity, but too many IT organisations are still trying to control or even prevent their use,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice-president and global head of research at Gartner. “We firmly believe that these technologies, and the ones to follow, will power the future economy provided the IT organisation lets go.”

Sondergaard added that this would let IT departments dedicate more of their resources to projects that could transform the business.