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The IT spending freeze is over, but UK IT shops are not about to return to the spendthrift days of the dot-com era. After two years of cutting and consolidation IT managers are once again being encouraged to invest, but this time, according to the findings of the latest Infoconomy Effective IT Strategy Survey, only projects with clear business benefits are being considered.

A year ago, the survey responses reflected the priorities of a commercial IT community recovering from a period of excess in straightened economic times. The top five list of IT strategies deployed in the previous 12 months was headed by project size reduction and accompanied by strategies focussed on reducing the number of suppliers to IT and on consolidating sprawling server farms.

In early 2004, users' priorities were clear: they wanted to realise short-term benefits by reducing the complexity of their systems, re-establishing control over their procurement strategies, and deliver working projects quicker and to budget.

Those goals have not been abandoned. But, having regained control of their IT estates, this year users are focussed on the longer-term, and in particular on the creation of application and service platforms that are more flexible, more manageable and, critically, more responsive to changing business needs.

The desire for flexibility, for instance, is demonstrated by users' renewed commitment to remote and mobile working. Last year's second most widely adopted IT strategy is this year's clear leader, favoured by 82% of our survey's 433 respondents.

Three of the other most widely adopted strategies are also clearly motivated by businesses' increasing expectation of IT to be more adaptable and responsive in the future. Such thinking prompted 48% of respondents to accelerate their development processes by adopting web services integration technology, while another 40% set out on the road to the dynamic, autonomic systems infrastructure by investing in automated systems tools.

The strong showing of using e-learning tools to train IT and non-IT staff, adopted by 57% of respondents, can also be seen as an example of IT managers investing in technologies which, whilst they may have some immediate benefits, will more surely pay dividends in the long-term.

Making IT pay

But how effective have these investments been? Remote and mobile working ranked fourth in our list of most effective strategies, having been rated "very effective" by 24% of those that adopted it.

The other most widely adopted strategies (e-learning, web services integration, asset management and automated systems management) all received positive effectiveness ratings from their users.

However, for companies still looking for a more immediate return on their IT investment, again open source appears to offer the most dramatic short-term gains. This year open source investments took both first and second place in our rankings, with 34% of those who have deploy-ed Linux rating it "very effective", and 31% who have adopted open source applications or middleware rating it as high. Predictably, consolidating all communications on an IP backbone was another winning strategy, rated "very effective" by 24% of its adopters. Less predictable was that the strategy of appointing an IT security manager was rated just as high - and by a larger body of users. Perhaps, at last, the strategic value of IT security is beginning to be recognised.

A full review of the Effective IT Survey will be published next month and presented at the Effective IT Summit, a two-day conference for senior executives responsible for IT strategy or investment in London 23 and 24 February. For a free place, email events manager, Imogen Craig, at icraig@information-age.com.