No one can know for sure what the future holds but there are certain predictions that help us navigate the tides of the changing economies in 2012. Studying these forecasts allow us to make informed decisions about how we invest time, money, and resources against our financial goals.
We were recently invited to participate in a conference call on the outlook for IT spending in 2012, featuring a speaker from InformationWeek.
There are a couple of points worth mentioning from this conference call:
- IT spend in 2012 is generally going to be increased over 2011, which some might think is underwhelming news given the challenges we all faced in 2011.
- The overall demand on IT is going to increase as business units seek to find ways to optimize their business processes.
- Lastly, because of cuts in years past, IT’s ability to adapt to change, and the notion that IT is considered an integral part of the business expansion, projected hiring in IT organizations is going to rise in 2012.
These predictions are no surprise to us.
We have always believed that as new innovative technologies sprout, the demand to utilize, deploy, and maintain them by IT organizations corresponds. The explosion of social media, cloud computing, and self service applications in 2011 was phenomenal, and the IT staff answered the call once again by implementing these applications at an exceptional pace. We believe this demand highlights the importance of project and portfolio management solutions because, as demand increases, delivery response times from IT will too. This can only be effectively executed by using solutions such as Innotas’ PPM and APM to manage time, money, and resources, which is something we’ve espoused for many years.
It is also worth mentioning that today’s IT staff is effective at adjusting and adapting their work efforts to long term projects. They are very good at building and deploying in increments while articulating value to the business with each increment, and if budgets change or business growth decreases, they are able to “put on the brakes” and allocate resources elsewhere. Project and program visibility into each IT initiative enables fast and accurate decision making while saving time and money. Fact.
Our core business is based on empowering CIO’s, IT VP’s, directors, and project managers to effectively manage the many demands placed on them. We believe in their mission and will continue to support the trends for growth or reduction, whatever the future holds, IT will need tools to deal with both. We will be waiting and ready as always.
Given the trends of 2011 and projections for 2012 , including mobile applications, marketing applications, personalization, and big data, the demands on IT organization will continue to proliferate and IT will continue to answer the call.
We don’t say it’s easy, we say it’s possible!
Happy New Year.
