In case you needed some one other than your boss to tell you so, your budget is being cut. So says a recently released IT Spending research report from Computer Economics. There is a summary available on their web site and a longer version is available for sale. More interesting, according to the IT managers surveyed:
"Furthermore, the 4.0% planned increase in IT budgets in 2008 (Author's note: vs. over 5% in 2007 depending on which research firm's data is used) may prove to be optimistic. According to our survey, 25% of IT executives do not expect to spend all of the money allocated to them in their IT budgets......."
Worse yet, capital budgets for information technology are flat. As expected the rates vary by industry, with manufacturers seeing almost no growth and energy/utility companies growing their budgets up to 8-9% (for the same reason thiefs rob banks). This is a U.S./Canada survey with an n of 200, fairly small for the industry splits to be too projectable.
So what business processes will be automated with these smaller spending levels? The company says that
"The hottest priorities for IT organizations... are... to improve service levels (#1) and better manage risks by improving disaster recovery capabilities (#2) and increasing IT security (#3), while at the same time reducing the cost of ongoing IT maintenance and support (#4). Around half of respondents across all sectors indicated that these priorities are increasing in importance this year."
That makes it sound like a good year for the other half of CRM, the customer service and retention end of the CRM process set that rarely gets mentioned because all the emphasis is on salesforce automation and marketing.
CRM is a particularly important solution area for business process management (BPM) because it is one of the functions least integrated into ERP suites. That means BPM software can be used to tie the two together whether or not the CRM is another software package like ERP or a home-grown Web 2.0 capability. Both Jan Baan and >many users like yourselves talked about the importance of the CRM solutions area in our recent articles available here on ebizQ.
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