Research: The devalued future of IT in a marketing world
New research demonstrates the changing role of IT. Here is advice to ensure your IT organization is not marginalized as a consequence of these changes.
Gartner analyst, Mark P. McDonald, wrote a compelling piece showing IT growth rates over the last decade. Here's his graphic showing the trend:
You can see that IT growth rates have declined dramatically and are rising slowly. Given high activity levels around computing that we see in the enterprise, Mark tries to reconcile these slowing growth rates. His conclusion:
It’s difficult to reconcile these budget numbers against the level of IT activity. CIOs and IT have been busy over the past ten years. Activity requires funding, so in an environment of flat budgets you have to ask where is the money coming from?
The answer is most of the money has come from IT sweating its assets and resources — doing more with less. Or more accurately doing more while keeping the budget flat. Outsourcing, offshoring, consolidation, renegotiating contracts all play a role in cutting IT costs and keeping them down, even in the face of increased transaction and data storage demands. This has made IT infrastructure one of the most productive resources in the organization.
We can conclude that most organizations view IT as a means to increase productivity and efficiency, rather than a source of innovation and business transformation.
As another data point, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicts, "by 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO." Her webinar on this topic includes the following slide, showing that marketing budgets are large and growing more rapidly than those in IT:
This next chart completes the picture: marketing is taking more control over its own technology budget and leaving IT in the dust: