And this pigeonhole of a metric certainly doesn’t reflect the ever-evolving and growing importance of IT investments in relation to a company’s ability to grow and compete. The run, grow, transform (RGT) model may be a better approach.

Read my CIO Matters column to see why Richard Hunter, vice president and Gartner fellow, recommends using a RGT model (and other more forward-looking metrics) for allocating IT spend, and learn about the real-life challenges CIOs encounter when using said RGT model.

These CEO survey findings are sobering, but not as surprising as they were at first glance. I learned from Gartner analyst Mark Raskino that for some reason the poll excluded CEOs in the tech industry, where the path from CIO to CEO is more obvious. As for the poor showing of CIOs as innovation leaders, it’s a bummer — but, again, not unexpected from people with the requisite egos and survival instincts of CEOs. Rather than feel miffed, CIOs are better served if they follow the money.

According to the CEO survey, IT spending holds up fairly well: 40% of CEOs said they plan to increase IT spending in 2012. Where CEOs plan their biggest budget increases, however, is in sales (50%) and product enhancement (46%). Spending on risk management, legal and compliance is another priority (46%). On the other hand, marketing is relatively low on the totem pole (36% and seventh on the list of budget increases) in 2012. And what hardly any CEOs plan to spend more money on is business services (15%) and property and facilities (12%).

Gartner’s advice for CIOs, in so many words?

• Do anything you can to help facilitate and lower the cost of sales.
• Make sure you understand the risks and compliance issues the business faces, and do what you can to rationalize these burdens so the company is not spending money on redundant controls.
• Since IT is considered by CEOs to be more investable than “business services,” banish that term from your IT budget.
• And if you are thinking about expanding your duties by taking on facilities management — an area CIOs are sometimes asked to oversee — run the other way.

• From the “don’t tell your teenager” file, sometimes a GPA ain’t nothin’ but a number. There’s book smart, there’s street smart and there’s Steve Jobs smart.

• How well do you know your colleagues in marketing? If you haven’t taken the time to get to know them, you’re going to want to, because, well, it just makes good business sense for everyone. (And Gartner predicts that in five years, your CMO will be spending more on IT than you do.)

• In Forbes, Erica Dhawan, writer, speaker, leadership consultant and Wharton grad, asserts that business schools don’t prepare women for leadership roles. Do you think the same is true in IT?

• Up in the sky, it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s – Oracle CEO Larry Ellison trying to buy the cloud?

• Is there room for one more in the C-suite? Pondering the creation of the Chief Collaboration Officer role.

• The storm clouds are gathering. According to Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of a global-scale clash on privacy laws.

Even those companies that have huge amounts of cash right now are not spending as much as Gartner expected, said Kenneth Brant, research director for Gartner, in a phone call about the report.

“Many are still playing wait and see with spending, and I don’t mean just IT spending but spending across the board,” Brant said. “We’re not seeing the cash on hand turn into hires or capital investment.” That’s not to say companies aren’t making any strategic investments. (Intel Corp.’s strong earnings suggest a PC refresh is coming, he said.) But the refresh likely will be set off by trims elsewhere, with the goal of keeping budgets flat. “That’s more the mood we’re seeing than anyone planning a 6% or 7% increase,” he said.

The uptick in 2010 IT spending, however modest, is still much better than the 5.9% decline in 2009 IT spending, of course. Moreover, the downgrade is not entirely due to an organic decrease in spending, explained Brant, but was due in part to the appreciation of the dollar in 2010 against the euro and other major currencies, which depresses the growth in the industry.

But altogether, the report is more evidence of the economy’s frail state in 2010, and consistent with recent news that the global economy is slowing.

Indeed, the possibility of weaker spending in 2011 is anticipated in the Gartner report, which comes with a warning that technology providers should prepare for zero growth in 2011, as “commercial IT markets stagnate and governments transition to fiscal austerity programs.”

“We keep hearing about consumer confidence,” Brant said. “Until corporate confidence returns, we are going to see very cautious approaches to IT spending in 2010 and 2011.”

The news does not surprise me, given my own conversations with CIOs over the past several weeks about what’s happened with 2010 budgets and what they’re anticipating for 2011. While IT staff cuts seem to be behind most folks, many are telling me that budgets are flat. I would like to hear what your IT spending looks like, as your companies face more economic uncertainty ahead.

Write to me at ltucci@techtarget.com.