Global CIOs expect to spend 39% of their IT budget on information management projects in 2012, up from 36% in 2011 according to a report from research firm, Corporate Executive Board (CEB).
The report suggests that customer experience, data analytics and the facilitation of "knowledge workers" will take priority over business processes within corporate IT departments. The IT budget set aside for business processes in 2012 is 32%, down a point from 2011.
CEB attributed the changes to "the rise of big data" and organisations’ desire to gain a competitive advantage through the use of information.
As well as the headline finding, CEB also found 20% of CIOs surveyed already using the cloud in "substantial ways", but said that service-level agreements, security governance, performance degradation, billing models, and legal ambiguity are the areas which need work to accelerate public cloud adoption.
CEB estimates $38 billion in total global IT spending for 2012, with an increase of less than 3% through the year and flattened capital expenditure, after it increased by more than 20 percent in 2011. While that increase in capital spend allowed companies to clear a backlog of projects left over from the recession, CEB estimates that capital expenditure in IT will increase by only 5 percent in North America and will decline steeply (14%) in Europe amid economic woes.
The average IT worker in 2015 would be more likely to have skills in stakeholder management, risk management, or usability design than in server administration or coding, the report concluded, predicting that new roles would emerge such as ‘collaboration evangelist’ or ‘service architect’.
"Only 25% [of the current IT department] will remain within IT, while up to 30% will move to a multifunctional shared services group or to business units," the report said.
