“I want to be the IT guy who’s out of the IT business.” –CIO at an asset management company.
Earlier this week, I was reviewing Computerworld’s 2015 Tech Spending survey results, published a few months ago. Looking at the numbers again, it’s clear that the story isn’t about specific technologies as much as it is about the evolution of the IT department.
Top Tech Spending Trends for 2015
Source: Computerworld
Security spending is no surprise. (Would you want to be the person who has to explain, post-incident, why security wasn’t a priority? Me neither.) But the increases in cloud and analytics shouldn’t be surprising either. In-house IT teams have become focused more on revenues and strategic initiatives, and less on problems such as managing infrastructure, now handled more often by experts at outside organizations. Accordingly, 24% of respondents expected to decrease spending on hardware.
The real news, as written in Forbes: “In 2015 IT will take on an increasingly important role growing revenue, profitability, enhancing competitiveness and getting to know customers.” In the past, the primary goal of an IT budget was worker productivity. But here, the number one reason given for increasing spending on cloud computing and business analytics was “to generate new revenue streams and increase existing ones.”
Today’s business leaders will be working and competing with more people like David Dodds, the CIO quoted in Forbes and at the top of this post. Dodds expects to spend about half of this year’s IT budget on cloud-based services, and will let the vendors worry about hardware. “I don’t have to have servers, and [employees can] bring whatever computer they have or I’ll just buy them a Chromebook.”
For an in-depth look at the role of cloud in business analytics, register for our upcoming webinar, Actionable Data: Mastering the Hybrid Analytics Mix.
