New Year, a New Approach to IT Budgets

Planning for an upcoming budget can be a daunting and unwelcome task at the best of times. Especially IT budgets.

For businesses that operate without executive level technology input, planning for an IT budget could be almost seen as an impossibility. I don’t mean to discredit the many Finance Directors out there who have overall responsibility for IT in their organisations but I’ve said before that it’s a bit like getting a plumber to do an electricians work – and vice versa. For a start there are only two digits in IT – 1 and 0 😉

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Quips aside, prior to a potential client engaging with Economit, we have observed that IT budgets tend to be a little samey year after year. Statements like “well, we bought this amount of IT products & services last year so it’s fair to say we’ll spend the same amount this year with maybe a few extra points added on for inflation/growth plans” are all too common. And unfortunately all too wrong.

I think we can all safely agree that technology is changing the business landscape rapidly – it has been doing so for decades so nothing new there. I’d go as far as to say by the day in fact nowadays – new products & services are appearing to market at unbelievably accelerated rates. Granted these products & services may take a while to mature and become “mainstream” before they will be considered viable by the majority of “non-early adopters” but even so, these accelerated rates are causing pressure for businesses to adopt new tech much more quickly than ever before.

So I would like to pose a simple question: with technology developing so rapidly, why do IT budgets remain fairly static or even decrease year on year?

To which maybe, there’s a simple answer: businesses don’t know any better and therefore always do the same tech things (and consequently get the same tech results).

Without executive technological direction, there is no discernible way that a growth-aspirational business can budget accurately for technology expenditure. Yes, it’s true that there are more IT products & services to choose from than ever before which in turn, makes the choices that much harder to make so therefore it would make common sense to ensure this vital budget is put in the hands of an expert who is technical enough to understand it, experienced enough to be able to deal with it, impartial enough to guarantee complete trust in the decision making process and commercial enough to make sure your business actually grows from it.

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