CIOs are spending more on information management and collaboration as their spending priority shifts towards driving business growth, according to a survey by executive advisory group CEB.

The IT Budget Benchmarking surveyasked 184 CIOs from around the world about their planned IT spending for 2013. It found that, on average, CIOs expect to spend 26% of their IT budgets on technologies and services that help them to capitalise on new business opportunities – up by a third from 18% in 2009.

At the same time, a growing proportion of IT spending is being allocated to information management and collaboration (32%) compared to process automation (30%). Before 2010, organisations typically spent more on process automation.

According to Matthew Charlet, research director at CEB, these findings are two sides of the same coin.

“If you look at where competitive advantage lies for companies in the next few years, it’s in making sure teams work much better together; it’s in making sure the customer interface works across multiple platforms; and it’s also in business intelligence – and not just the data warehousing component, but also making sure it’s easy for employees to gain insight from the data,” he says.

“So as IT spending is leaning more towards trying to take advantage of business opportunities, [CIOs] are trying to make sure they’re putting out the tools that will help employees analyse data better and work together better as teams,” Charlet explains.

The survey found that capital expenditure (capex) on IT shot up 9.7% between 2011 and 2012, as organisations went ahead with IT investments that had been deferred during the economic crisis. Operational expenditure rose 5% during this time, bringing overall IT spending up by 6.3%.

In 2013, however, CIOs expect to stick to the new, higher level of IT spending. They expect a 1.8% overall increase in IT spending in 2013, with a 2.5% increase in opex and zero growth in capex.