Despite continued strong growth in Asia Pacific economies, chief information officers (CIOs) should create contingency plans to cope with escalating personnel costs and skills shortages and to prepare for the potential of global economic uncertainty in 2008, Gartner advised.
Senior vice president and head of research Peter Sondergaard warned that due to the recent turmoil in credit markets around the world and continued uncertainty surrounding the future economic climate, companies need to plan for all eventualities. "Your IT budget for 2008 must reflect a continued focus on supporting business growth," Mr. Sondergaard said. "However it should build in cost contingencies for dealing with escalating personnel costs due to a rising skills shortage and declining quality in IT projects."
Business spending on technology is growing fastest in software, services and mobility. These three categories made up 57 percent of spending in 2006, will become 60 percent in 2008 and grow to 63 percent in 2011. According to Gartner, global IT spending will reach US.1 trillion in 2007 and spending for 2008 is forecast to grow 5.5 percent to reach US.3 trillion. IT spending in the Asia Pacific region has a forecast annual growth rate of 9 percent in the next 3 years.
Gartner analysts examined how IT leaders can drive growth for the business. They emphasized that this cannot be accomplished unless IT leaders understand the business of their company, and highlighted six business imperatives that IT must support:
1. Attract and Retain Customers
Gartner analysts outlined how IT leaders need to attract and retain customers by taking advantage of an efficient, secure, always available communications environment. In the emerging strategies for communications, user control is critical. Communications in context, at the right time and place, makes a significant difference.
2. Maximize Profitability and Effectiveness
IT must also deliver an efficient, lean, and green infrastructure to maximize profitability and competitive capabilities. IT leaders must run an agile operation that can support the needs of the company as it evolves.
3. Improve Business Processes
A business is the sum of its process. Processes - what they do and how they perform – drive business value, and they drive differentiation. IT has addressed the majority of simple and straightforward processes – those that are predictable, repeatable, and neatly controlled. Advanced organizations will harness the most complex, most volatile, most dynamic and multi-party processes.
4. Stop Deleting Opportunities
With the volume of all messages that workers receive—e-mail, text, instant messages, voice mail—the challenge for many is to delete as many of these messages as they can. People want only the right information all the time. Companies want the same thing, at the million documents and billion transaction levels.
5. Build Innovative and Agile Organizations
It is not enough to be merely efficient. The business must also be agile in order to respond to changing demands. Organizations must find new ways to do better things. Business needs innovation, and that means moving beyond the activities that IT people have obsessed about. IT has been asked to reduce costs, tighten compliance and reduce or even eliminate risk, all while reducing costs.
6. Managed Risk
IT leaders need to understand the risk related to the use of IT, and these people communicate that risk, so the business can make an educated and informed decision whether or not that risk is acceptable. It is not IT’s job to say no.
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