Six Emerging Trends to Invest in 2012

Bangalore: Lately, a few IT trends have been identified that will remain immune to the tightening grip on IT budget in 2013 as CIOs scamper new ways to generate business value. The cut in IT budget might also mean a limited scope for innovation for CIOs. However, there are six areas, that can uplift the ego as well as the morale of the CIOs in the coming year, enabling them to continue be seated as the driver for change and growth within the organization, reports Andrew Horne of InformationWeek.

Corporate Executive Board conducted a survey among 200 companies worldwide which revealed a higher spending in operational expenditures with capital expenditures projected to remain stagnant. These companies, whose overall IT spending comes to around $52 billion annually, were quizzed and found that their IT budget would increase a meager 1.8 percent which is significantly lower as compared to the 5  to 10 percent growth in the IT budget over the past several years.

However, CIOs are not losing heart and planning to make the most of their analytical and strategic skills in following six domains:
Information Beats Process- IT budget in 2013 will primarily focus on information management and less on process automation. Incidentally, information management projects grab the largest share in the project budget category for third year running.

Mobile Applications- Spending on mobile applications will also increase as it is expected to grow as much as by 50 percent, forming nearly 2 percent of the total IT expenditure.

Cloud Services- The survey also revealed that more than 50 percent of the respondents are planning to invest in cloud, pertaining to public services. More will be spent on software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service is also catching up.

End-to-End IT Services- CIOs are also contemplating to spend in end-to-end IT services, as this new trend has picked up pace over the last couple of years yielding  more fruitful business outcome.

Investing in New Roles- Organizations world over are also thinking to create new positions such as service managers, service architects, information architects and experience designers who can cater to the business needs in a specific and programmed manner.

Indifferent towards Outsourcing- The survey also concluded that enterprises will be less inclined in outsourcing and would rather execute the requisite functions within the company, although outside the IT sector.

These are the six sectors to which a CIO can look forward to in building fresh IT skills and roles through an amalgamation of employee insights, rather through process automation, leading to a more productive outcome from the IT in the coming year.