Much as we'd like to, we can't promise that the IT department's job is going to get any easier this year. "The free-spending days are well over," concludes Bruce Guptill, vice president of marketing for IT services company Tallán. On average, IT budgets are expected to be up just 8 percent this year, cooling off from last year's 12 percent growth rate, according to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
Tighter budgets mean it's more important than ever to back up vision with planning. In the past, companies worried more about the requirements of a specific software application than the health of their network. Not anymore. "An increasingly large percentage of customers are now viewing infrastructure as a foundation to support their e-business as a whole, rather than being technology-specific to an application," says Georges Khoury, general manager of integrated technology services for IBM Global Services.
Instead of simply buying enough servers to support the latest customer relationship management (CRM) app, focus on laying the technology foundation best suited to your company's overall needs. That means thinking in terms of centralised, companywide standards. Gone are the days of disparate initiatives, disconnected wide-area networks, and multiple databases.
Building infrastructure takes qualified help, of course, and even increased international-worker visa quotas are not expected to remedy the ongoing IT staffing shortfall. This worker deficit is now estimated to be as high as 800,000, according to a recent Morgan Stanley Dean Witter report. To make up for the lack of internal tech resources, many companies are increasingly turning to outsourcingââ,¬"but only for noncritical tasks like storage management. "Companies are not going to put critical functions outside unless they can find a supplier who is dependent, with proven experience," says Jim Graves, managing director of the Aberdeen Group. Graves highlights recent moves by both GM and Ford to turn over the management of their enormous data centres to Arthur Andersen, working with Compuware in GM's case and IBM in Ford's.
