How IT money will be allocated this year is to be determined. If it hasn't happened already, you'll soon be deep in conversation with senior executives about your budget in particular and technology spending in general. Get ready for long meetings in which managers pass around charts of bad news. And after that? Budget cuts and hiring freezes.
Across all industries, average IT budgets, measured as a percent of revenue, have shrunk compared to last year, dropping from 7.4 percent to 6.7 percent, according to CIO.com's end-of-year "State of the CIO" poll of 558 corporate technology leaders.
One manufacturing CIO says things are so bad at his company that he doesn't even want to talk about IT budgeting. "I'm afraid I could not afford to be candid," he says.
"We're planning for a tough year across the company," says Kevin Bott, CIO of Ryder System, the $6.3-bn transportation company. "We're trying to be as fiscally responsible as we can for all budgets, not just IT. If the economy does better, that's an upside. But we don't want to be caught."
No one does.
Source: CIO, http://cio.com