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The Effective IT Survey 2009 finds the preferred strategies of IT leaders largely unchanged, but cost-cutting is clearly on the cards

Part of the goal of the Effective IT Survey is to catch emerging IT strategies as they burst into the limelight of enterprise adoption. In 2009’s survey, however, the most remarkable finding was the relative consistency of IT strategy over time.

The top six most adopted strategies among the 2009 sample – made up of 355 CIOs, IT managers and other senior IT professionals - were essentially unchanged from the previous year.

“Encouraged remote and mobile working” was the most widely adopted IT strategy for the third year running, with 81.7% of respondents having done so. “Adopting asset management and help desk automation tools” stayed in the number three place, with 63.9% adoption; “Implementing a unified IP network architecture” remained at number four with 61.5%; “Server virtualisation” and “Automated systems management tools” were again at five and six, with 56.1% and 54.1% respectively.

In the 2008 survey, the number two spot went to “Used collaboration software”. In 2009, that strategy was broken down into two specific types of collaboration: “Used video conferencing” and “Formally adopted Web 2.0 tools”. The first of these took its predecessor’s number two slot with a stunning 71% adoption rate.

The two new entries to the top ten most adopted strategies were storage virtualisation, whose addition was almost inevitable given the steady rise in the use of the different types of virtualisation during the past few years. “Adopted storage virtualisation” moved from number 11 in 2008 to number eight this year, with 43.5% of respondents having employed the strategy.

The other new entry to the top ten was also perhaps unsurprising, given the state of the economy. “Reducing IT staffing costs” moved from the 14th most adopted strategy of 2008 to the ninth in 2009.

Looking at the number of respondents who had adopted the various strategies for the first time last year gives a clearer impression of what is up and coming. “Deployed server virtualisation” topped the chart of adoption in the past year (26.8%), followed by “Reducing IT staffing costs” and “Formally adopted Web 2.0 tools” (both 20.2%).

What IT leaders expect to be doing in the coming year can be seen in the proportion of respondents planning to deploy the various strategies in the next 12 months.

Top of the agenda are power concerns, with 26.3% of respondents planning to have “deployed power management strategies or software” by the start of 2010. Beyond making power usage more efficient, data management is still clearly a bugbear for the UK’s IT leaders; information lifecycle management and master data management ranked second and third on next year’s to-do list.

On the other end of the adoption scale was “Deployed Linux on the desktop” with only 11.5% of respondents reporting adoption. That situation looks unlikely to change; it also ranked bottom among strategies that respondents plan to adopt in the next 12 months.

Budget blitz

There was little other upheaval in the effectiveness rankings. The top five most effective strategies was largely unchanged, although storage virtualisation fell from the top spot last year to number four, with 77.5% of adopters rating it either “effective” or “very effective”. “Implemented a unified IP network architecture”, last year’s number two, stepped up to take first place with 86.1% of adopters rating the strategy as effective.

The most pronounced rise in the effectiveness ratings concerned the strategy of “Adopting a service-oriented architecture” which, back in 2008, ranked as only the 23rd most effective strategy. This year it came in at number ten on the effectiveness rankings. That suggests that while 12 months ago, businesses were struggling to achieve returns on their complex SOA projects, now those companies that have adopted SOA are beginning to see the long-promised benefits.

Two other climbers were “Used asset management and helpdesk automation tools” (74.1% effective) and “Deployed automated systems management tools” (71.8% effective). These were not unpopular beforehand, but their combined rise suggests that the systems and service management tools arena is one where effectiveness is improving.

A surprise drop in effectiveness was seen for the strategy of “Deploying software-as-a-service”. Last year’s ninth most effective strategy, SaaS was this year’s seventh least effective, having been described by 13.5% of respondents as either not very effective or not effective.

One might think that this fall in its effectiveness rating followed SaaS’s passage to mainstream adoption, as was widely predicted for 2008. However, in the time in which SaaS’s effectiveness rating dropped so dramatically, adoption barely climbed at all – from 21.7% in 2008 to 23.3% in 2009.

It is hard to know what to make of this trend based on these numbers alone. Suffice it to say, the move from proprietary computing to the on-demand delivery model is far from a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, the strategy of reducing IT staffing costs saw an improvement in perceived effectiveness, mirroring the increase in adoption of the strategy, albeit a mild one: it moved from the least effective strategy of 2008 to third least in 2009, with 21.7% of adoptees describing it as not very effective or not effective.

But the most clear demonstration of the impact of the credit crunch came from responses to the Effective IT Report’s supplementary question on how IT budgets will change in 2009. Unsurprisingly, 42.1% of respondents said that their budgets would decrease in 2009, and 32.6% said theirs would stay the same.

Whatever IT strategies the Information Age community does choose to deploy in 2009, one thing is clear: cutting costs will be more important than ever before.