IT trends 2016: IT budgets are growing and being invested in equipping the specialist departments

37% of companies expect spending on their corporate IT to grow in 2016. 15% of the companies even expect the growth rate to be in the double digits. In contrast, 21.3% of IT managers are facing budget cuts.

The preliminary results of the annual IT trend study conducted by the French management consultancy Capgemini show that CIOs also expect increasing investment in IT for the following year, whereas forecasts for 2018 are somewhat more restrained.

The expenditure breakdown reveals that more is slated for updates, upgrades and enhancements than in previous years. The proportion of these investments is increasing from 20.9 to 22.7%. IT departments are thereby clearly responding to the specialist departments’ complaints about outdated equipment. These increases are nevertheless at the cost of investments in new systems: They will account for only 16.6% of expenditure in 2016, whereas the figure was 20.9% for the current year. Dr Uwe Dumslaff, Chief Technology Officer at Capgemini in Germany, criticises this development: He feels the digital transformation cannot be carried out with updates, and that this requires taking more radical steps.

Another trend Capgemini has identified is the transfer of responsibilities for the IT budget from CIOs to the specialist departments. Many of them are apparently dissatisfied with their IT departments: 15.9% want to engage external providers in the future as their own specialists cannot deliver fast enough. This figure was only 12.9% in 2015.

The transfer of IT budgets to the specialist departments currently already affects more than 60% of companies and is being increasingly criticised by CIOs. They fear that doing so will result in a shadow IT and new data silos. According to CIOs, the specialist departments are spending significantly less on IT overall than in previous years; their share in the total budget decreased from 17.3 to 12%. (Source: Capgemini/rf)

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