Spending on IT projects will continue to grow in the
second half of 2005, despite uncertainty about the economy and
anxiety caused by the terror attacks on London, according to UK IT
leaders.
Ben Booth, chairman of IT directors group Elite and CIO at Mori,
said the challenge for IT departments across the UK for the
remainder of the year was to be "flexible but not profligate".
IT directors have to balance delivering new systems with bearing
down on costs.
"In our business, we have to have elasticity in what we do. We
have to accommodate growth; we cannot screw costs down entirely
because we have to be flexible," said Booth.
Infrastructure projects to deliver the flexibility required by
the business include IP telephony, software upgrades, e-commerce
and server consolidation. These will add to an overall 4.6% growth
in UK IT spending in 2005, according to Kris Wicka, managing
director of Kew Associates, which produces the Computer Weekly IT
Expenditure Report.
Colin Simpson, group systems manager at brewer Fuller Smith and
Turner, is pushing through projects involving chip and Pin, mobile
applications, server consolidation and e-commerce. In addition,
demand continues to put pressure on existing IT service levels, he
said.
"A few budgets are stretching a bit and there is reasonable
pressure to control costs. Storage is an ongoing problem and
climbing - our storage is increasing by 3% to 4% a month," said
Simpson.
Business development is a key focus in financial services
organisations. Jerome Gudgeon, vice- president of technology at
American Express Financial Services Europe, said, "We are looking
to enhance the roll-out of our payments platform. We might be
replacing a legacy system or putting it into a fresh market."
John Worth, chief information officer at financial services firm
Prudential, said, "I have three tasks: one is to improve service.
Reducing cost is another. We are looking at every opportunity we
can. The third is delivering on business change projects."
Demonstrating return on investment will be important in the
public sector. Richard Steel, head of ICT at Newham Council, said a
continuing focus was IP convergence and IP infrastructure.
"Infrastructure is key to support data storage and the transmission
of information," he said.
Now that Newham has the IT systems to meet e-government targets,
Steel said his key task was to drive payback by getting more people
to use the systems.
Joe van Valkenburgh, director of information management at
Network Rail, is in the middle of a Windows XP Active Directory
roll-out to 16,500 desktops.
Although most IT directors are confident of hanging on to their
budget allocations for the remainder of 2005, van Valkenburgh said,
"I am giving some of my budget back this year. My capital
expenditure budget is £138m. I expected to spend £90m this
year."