2010: Big Year For Business Technology
In the coming year, as the economy begins a protracted recovery from the deepest recession since the Great Depression, technology will play an unprecedented role in helping businesses pick up the pieces. As leaders decide what hardware, software and services they’ll need to remain competitive, they will increasingly realize just how fundamentally the tech landscape has changed.
This brave, sometimes frightening new world of business technology is evolving for the following key reasons:
Workload: Post-layoff, organizations have fewer people left to manage the same — or heavier — volume of work. Those that fail to become more efficient will be left behind.
Budget shock: Businesses will remain gun-shy about making major capital investments in technology. If IT can’t make the business case, the financial decision makers won’t sign off. Projects that survive will be far more restrained in size and scope and will be inextricably connected to underlying business needs.
Competitiveness and agility: In any given market, there are fewer customers to be had. Hungrier vendors mean unprecedented levels of competition as everyone fights for a piece of a shrunken pie. More volatile market conditions compel companies to respond faster than ever before. They’ll need to know more about their internal and external environments, and they’ll need to know it sooner.
As 2010 dawns, revenue-starved, cash-strapped companies are challenged to leverage their MCITP Enterprise Administrator data and squeeze more productivity out of their people and systems. They need better ways to manage their information, to allow everyone in the organization to easily see it and to work with it to make better business decisions. The goal: greater insight, no matter what role you play, to identify and pursue opportunities and drive the bottom line.
Psychology Remains a Factor
These drivers place the average organization’s technology road map for 2010 and beyond into stark relief. Although indicators are turning positive, the psychological impact of the recession will continue to stunt investment through the year. Despite the fact that most companies have shied away from technology investments as they’ve tried to weather the storm — and are living with older infrastructure as a result — many won’t willingly dive back in as they maintain a tight grip on their corporate purse strings.
Recently released figures from Gartner bear this out. According to the research firm, global IT spending slid by 5.2 percent in 2009. Enterprise IT spending took an even bigger hit, with a 6.9 percent drop. While Gartner expects those figures to turn positive in the coming year, it’ll take until 2012 before spending returns to 2008 levels. Indeed, Gartner’s survey of CIOs indicated half of MCSE exams project zero-growth or shrinking budgets in 2010, with only slow growth into 2011.
Processing your request, Please wait....
