Gartner, the leading analysts' organisation, this week aims to
provide a survival guide to help IT directors plot their course
through the economic downturn, which has put severe pressure on
their budgets.
Steve Prentice, Gartner's director for research in Europe, told
CW360.com the Spring Symposium in Florence this week will focus on
how users can survive during the current "trough of disillusion".
He said users needed to be more rigorous in their IT spending to
make the best use of their environment. "Spend only on projects
that will have an immediate impact," said Prentice. Businesses need
to apply the same criteria they use to measure business performance
to IT expenditure, he added.
Recovery is some way off, said Prentice, who predicted that users
would not see any sure signs of an upturn until the tail end of
2003.
He told CW360.com that businesses should use this year - the
so-called "gap year" - to cut back on non-critical areas; get rid
of non-core technology and finish incomplete projects. There were,
he said, a lot of IT projects that had been started during the boom
that were now, "left in the doldrums".
"Many organisations have had their confidence severely dented by
the security implications following the 11 September bombings and
the postponement of 3G [mobile Internet]. Nevertheless, he said,
preparing for the recovery is as important as surviving the
downturn.
Prentice still has faith that 3G will be rolled out with only
slight delays to published timetables. The industry's enthusiasm
over Web services, Prentice believed, would take three to five
years of further development before it becomes mainstream.
For the long term he predicted the future would be in
biotechnology. Prentice said that within 10 years, biotechnology
would be the focal point for IT innovation, making heavy use of
cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Gartner predicts that some of these breakthroughs could see their
way into more mainstream computing applications.