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IT budget growth mirrors last year's as midmarket organizations seek to modernize and more.
Introduction
IT budgets at midsized companies are chiefly holding steady or growing for the coming year, as midmarket CIOs grapple with challenges, including IT modernization, company growth, and security and risk management.
These drivers of IT spending are the top three cited in an exclusive CIO Decisions magazine reader survey, to which nearly 400 subscribers responded in September 2006 (see Methodology, below). And they show at least one way in which midsized organizations differ from larger companies. Respondents from companies with more than $1 billion in revenue cite compliance rather than modernization as one of their top three business drivers.
Meanwhile, nearly half of survey respondents say their operational and capital budgets will hardly budge in 2007 -- the same percentage citing no IT budget growth in 2006. But there is good news as well: A nearly equal number of respondents say these budgets will grow by more than 5%.
Michael Conley, senior vice president of key accounts at consulting firm Forsythe Technology Inc. in Skokie, Ill., anticipates that IT spending for this fiscal year will be moderate, somewhere in the neighborhood of a 5% to 10% increase. (Twenty-six percent of our survey respondents expect similar IT spending growth in 2007.) "Rather than buying something new, companies are looking to snap on additional modules," he says.
For more data and stories about how some IT executives are putting their dollars to use, read on.
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