Brace yourself for more budget pressure, Gartner tells CIOs
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
"Second recession" means enterprise EMEA IT spending is back in decline, while CIOs are losing budget to the marketing department, analyst company claims
European CIOs can expect increasing pressure on their budgets, analyst company Gartner has warned, as the economic climate worsens and as the IT spending power of marketing departments grows.
Enterprise IT spending in the EMEA region will fall by 1.4% to €604 billion during 2011, the company believes, and will grow by just 2.3% next year.
The decline in spending will be especially steep in Western Europe, falling 1.8% in 2011 and growing by just 1.5% in 2012. And thanks to government austerity measures, public sector IT spending in West European will fall 4.8* in 2011 and by 1.7% in 2012.
"“The second recession is about to hit and CIOs must decide which way to turn,” said Gartner global head of research Peter Sondergaard. “The continued global economic uncertainty and the eurozone crisis will impact your IT budget in 2012, and your business will face difficult budgetary questions,"
Meanwhile, control over IT spending is shifting to the chief marketing officer, Gartner claims. "By 2014, CIOs will have lost effective control of 25 percent of their organisation’s IT spending, and by 2017, chief marketing officers may have a bigger IT budget than CIOs do," Sondergaard.
In order to deliver value in face of this budgetary pressure, CIOs must adopt a "post-modern" approach to IT. This involves taking a customer-focused approach to IT provision, adopting cloud computing, simplifying the end-user experience and embracing "creative destruction", Gartner said.
