Gartner has kicked off its Spring Symposium in Florence
today with a keynote address that painted a bleak picture of IT
spending for 2003.In an interview with Computer Weekly, keynote speaker Steve
Prentice, chief of research (hardware & systems sector), said,
"The recovery has not arrived. The business pressure continues to
be inextricable. 2003 will be another bad year for IT spending." He
said this has been exacerbated by the current political climate,
which has led to a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity with
businesses.
Prentice said IT budgets for 2003/4 were flat. Worse, research
from Gartner has found that CIOs were not spending their full
budget, partially because businesses were scaling back and making
job cuts, which reduced the need for new PCs. Prentice said some
CIOs were being extremely cautious with their meagre budgets,
spending only 70% of their allocated budget.
But tackling expenditure is going to prove more difficult for IT
managers this year, according to Prentice. "Most of the standard
ways to save money are out in the open, the low-hanging fruit have
gone," he added.
Prepare for the real-time enterprise
The message from the symposium was not new: prepare for the
upturn. Gartner presented an insight into where CIOs should focus
their attention. "If you want to build an IT architecture for the
21st century, you have to plan," said Prentice. Gartner's vision is
the real-time enterprise, a conceptual model to help businesses
compete in a time-sensitive world. He added that people's attitudes
to the concept of time have changed.
For instance, a recent Gartner G2 study found that 78% of
consumers chose convenience over price when purchasing groceries.
The conveniece factor is moving into the business world, changing
the way such people work prefer to work Prentice argued. "People
value their time more." For Prentice, the role of the CIO in the
real time enterprise is to examine business processes, looking at
how to avoid delays.
Mobile communications, business activity monitoring and linking
IT systems together using enterprise application integration, will,
according to Prentice, form the technology foundation to build a
real-time enterprise.