It is the second month in the new year and the usual buzz around the new year has almost settled down. I have been reading analyst predictions of top 10 trends and have been keenly listening to the “IT speak” from enteprise IT teams– their thoughts and plans.
Amidst all the noise about the latest and hottest trends and listings on what is in and what is not, one fundamental shift, about the enterprise IT, is unmistakable..
The IT function in an enterprise seems to be on defensive….Even as the recession seems to come to an end and companies world over claim a return back to a “new normal”, the IT budgets continue to be flattish…and the CIOs under pressure to show more “proof” that the spending on IT is delivering value. In the post 2008 days, IT has seen itself transform from a function which was focussed on how to aid and support the exploding growth of businesses to a function which is suddenly seen as “spending too much money” without necessarily showing enough of results.
The CIOs are hard pressed to keep their budgets flat and juggle their spend to reduce the keep-the-lights-on spend and increase the transformational maintenance spend. Trends like cloud and social networks while being powerful and game changing are giving them more power against the vendors but are also putting more power in the hands of business which can now directly go to cloud.
What this means to the ecosystem around the CIO, the product and the services vendors who serve the CIO, and the busienss groups who are CIO’s end customer. is the topic of another blog post…
