IT Managers Rethink Priorities

It may not come as much as a surprise, but reducing costs is a much higher priority for IT managers in 2009 than it was in 2008.
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In a just released survey conducted by Gartner, cutting enterprise costs now ranks as the second highest IT priority after the perennial front runner priority of improving business processes. The ability to improve business processes is the reason IT exists, so on just about every IT survey ever taken it ranks as the top priority. But cost cutting this year moved up to the second slot from the fifth slot when this slot was released last year. As part of that exercise, there is also a clear trend towards moving IT expenses out of the capital expense line and into operating expenses, which should translate into more use of software-as-a-service applications and cloud computing services.

But perhaps more importantly, improving the effectiveness of the workforce has now moved to the third slot in 2009 from the sixth slot in 2009. What that suggests is that IT is increasingly turning its attention to helping the companies they work for to get more out of the remaining workers they have. Layoffs will savage most of the workforce in any number of industries this year, so the survivors will need to be able to do a lot more to make up for their missing colleagues. Further evidence of this trend can be found in the fact that increasing the use of analytics and information has moved up to the fifth slot, a gain of three slots over 2008. The fourth highest priority is attracting and retaining customers, which fell from the second slot in 2008.

What all this means is that IT, thankfully, is not solely focused on cost cutting. In fact, what appears to be happening is that IT is starting to concentrate more on its historic mission to improve overall productivity. After all, the more IT is used to improve productivity, the more revenue that can be generated per employee. As part of that process, you can bet that IT organizations will be taking a more jaundiced look at the workflow processes that certain enterprise applications impose on the business.

Overall, things could be a lot worse given the fact that as the economy tightens most senior IT executives are holding the budget flat year over year as opposed to slashing and burning. But in these tough economic times, the ability to hold the budget flat is not what will determine whether a senior IT executive can expect to hold on to their job. Rather, senior IT executives are going to have to deliver on the promise of making the entire business run more profitably if they want to survive an extended economic downturn. Or as Gartner executive vice president Mark McDonald more succinctly put it, "CIOs that suffer from attention deficit disorder when it comes to business processes will not survive the downturn."

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BY Michael Vizard
Source：eWEEK

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