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Virtual Studio Magazine

The downturn in the economy is affecting the role and spending strategies of IT organizations, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft.

The study, announced on Tuesday, polled the opinions of 1,200 IT professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Roughly 300 survey participants were polled in each country for the study.

Overall, about half (55 percent) of the respondents said that the economy had “changed the role of IT in their organization.”

Respondents expected to spend 37 percent of their IT budgets on innovation vs. maintaining current systems. About half (48 percent) have kept their focus on “driving business efficiency.” Cost cutting turned out to be less of a concern among the respondents, with just 30 percent saying that spending reductions were their main focus.

An interesting article talking about what affect economic conditions were having on their IT budgets and their strategy, it’s great to see what other people are thinking or experiencing within their organizations. We need to be careful that the act of simply cutting budgets can change the mindset to one where regardless of where we are financially/operationally, the default response is “sorry, we haven’t got the staff”, coupled with the fact that cutting headcount can reduce your ability to meet your SLA/project requirements. We should be and can identify where the core costs are and address them rather than cutting costs for the sake of cutting costs – for example could we reduce call out by giving the follow the sun support teams more access, changing the monitoring or granting the operations team specific tasks to do when an alert is raised rather than call out everything? Could we look at which applications are causing the most calls and ask the business lines to address them where possible, is it a lack of training and understanding that is resulting in repeated calls? Do we need to provide further escalation and working with a specific application team to help them respond to and resolve incidents?

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