Gartner: IT budgets to rise by seven percent

According to Gartner's global CIO survey, Indian CIOs expect IT budgets to increase by seven percent in 2005, significantly higher than the global average of 2.5 percent. Three strong themes have emerged, viz. security and data protection, business continuity and business growth. (see Table 1)

Gartner says that Indian CIOs are focusing on building a solid foundation that will provide a long-term performance boost to their enterprise, whereas CIOs in other parts of the world are more concerned with short-term results. This ties in with India's strategic management priority, which is to improve business continuity planning, something that is ranked stronger in India than in the rest of the world.

As per the survey, the efforts of the Indian CIOs are concentrated on protecting the quality of earnings (long-term reliability) rather than just automating business for the sake of doing so. If processes are to be automated, it's important that, once they are automated, they are as reliable as possible. (see Table 2)

According to Gartner, a solid underpinning on enterprise-wide operating costs to ensure business costs do not get out of line exists in India. The rest of the world ranks enterprise-wide operating costs more strongly. However, in India, the focus is clearly on more strategic competitive positioning and long-term growth, rather than the tactical short-term revenue and strong constraints on investment.

Indian CIOs share some technology priorities with their global counterparts. Business intelligence, security enhancement tools and workflow management are important everywhere, but surprisingly Indians rank CRM much higher. This is perhaps because CRM ties in with their push for competitive advantage and delivering projects that enable business growth.
(see Table 3)

Table 2: Top 10 CIO strategic management priorities in 2005
In India	Overall Ranking	Worldwide	Overall Ranking
Improving business continuity and readiness	1	Delivering projects that enable business growth	1
Delivering projects that enable business growth	2	Linking business and IT strategies and plans	2
Consolidating the IT organisation and operations	3	Demonstrating the business value of IT	3
Faster time-to-market for new applications and IT services	4	Applying metrics to IT organisation and services	4
Linking business and IT strategies and plans	5	Tightening security and privacy safeguards	5
Tightening security and privacy safeguards	6	Improving business continuity and readiness	6
Implementing internal controls in the IS organisation and processes	7	Improving the quality of IT service delivery	7
Applying metrics to IT organisation and services	8	Consolidating the IT organisation and operations	8
Improving IT governance	9	Developing leadership in the senior IT team	9
Demonstrating the business value of IT	10	Improving IT governance	10
Source: Gartner EXP (January 2005)

Table 3: Top 10 CIO technology priorities in 2005
In India	Overall Ranking	Worldwide	Overall Ranking
Business Intelligence applications	1	Security enhancement tools	1
Customer relationship management (CRM)	2	Business Intelligence applications	2
Security enhancement tools	3	Mobile workforce enablement	3
Workflow management deployment and integration	4	Workflow management deployment and integration	4
Business process integration tools	5	Enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrades	5
Storage management	6	Storage management	6
Mobile workforce enablement	7	Voice and data integration over IP	7
Voice and data integration over IP	8	Customer relationship management (CRM)	8
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrades	9	Business process integration tools	9
Server virtualisation	10	Server virtualisation	10
Source: Gartner EXP (January 2005)