Nucleus Research, provider of investigative, case-based technology research and advisory services, recently released the results of its new survey showing half of US companies are planning to invest in information technology (IT) in 2012 more than what they had invested this year.
The Nucleus Research survey shows that 10 percent of the companies surveyed are planning an increase of 10 percent investments in IT or greater. Only one out of 10 companies plan to decrease IT spending next year.
According to Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research of Nucleus Research, companies are bullish on technology spending based on these survey results. “While there is a temptation to cut IT budget right now, our survey shows that companies view technology investments as a means to drive efficiencies and make existing employees more productive,” says Wettemann.
Nucleus Research is expecting to see continued investment in various IT areas including CRM, integration, business intelligence and analytics, and workforce management. Software in particular is more flexible than ever. It is representing one of the only investments that can provide both cost containment and revenue growth opportunities.
Also in the survey report, Nucleus Research identified ways on how to improve IT spending. This include moving applications to the cloud in which Nucleus Research found that typical companies can redeploy 15 percent to 25 percent of their overall IT personnel budget.
They are also suggesting that companies should move custom applications to the bottom of their priority list because commercially developed and supported applications meet at least 80 percent of requirements today.
Nucleus Research is also telling companies to get real about asset management. Its survey found that 42 percent of companies made unnecessary software or hardware purchases. Nucleus Research believes all this could have been avoided only if they had access to more accurate data about their applications.
The survey also found that custom report writing is costly, time consuming and often lags behind the need for answers business users are trying to solve.
Finally, Nucleus Research went on to suggest that IT training should be eliminated believing that if an enterprise application is so unintuitive it requires training, vendor-provided training should be part of the purchase agreement package.
