During October’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, we were all pleased to hear that the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, but it was also loud and clear that IT budgets will remain tight. The mood for next year seems to be “cautious optimism.”  As The Wall Street Journal summarized, “Companies have been holding back on IT spending as demand across the global economy slumped in late 2008 and early 2009. Despite signs that things have improved, many expect corporations to keep a tight leash on spending at least until they are convinced a sustainable economic recovery has taken hold.”

(You can watch Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, talk about IT spending at the Symposium on this CNET video.)

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

That means as IT professionals, we need to find ways to work with conservative budgets and the results of staffing and resource changes over the past year, while still setting the stage for future growth.  To do this CIOs and IT Managers are focusing on a few top priorities:

• Getting back to business: IT will begin to restart delayed projects, equipment investments, and upgrades, but with a reassessment of needs based on the impact of the down economy, as well as the impact to future business priorities.

• Automate and integrate: Analysts see automation as the next big trend to help IT organizations achieve the next wave of objectives and improve IT maturity and efficiency. Breakthrough technologies and techniques will enable them to significantly improve processes.  The key is not to automate processes in silos, but look for solutions that connect your workflows and integrate processes for full lifecycle management and connection across the business.  If you don’t, you’ll end up using valuable resources as bridges between your different automation solutions. Ease of administration and minimized consulting requirements for implementation will also be key criteria for solution investments.

• Standardize and consolidate: As IT organizations adopt new automation solutions, they will also look for ways to reduce the number of disparate tools that perform similar functions or don’t work well together, seeking more integrated solutions and striving to standardize and consolidate their tools.  Standardization drives down costs, because there are fewer tools to buy, maintain and train people to use, and combined solutions improve functions, such as desktop management and virtualization.

• Demonstrate cost savings: As I mentioned, there will be a continued focus on cost reduction, but more importantly, IT will need to demonstrate these savings and prove its value to the business.  This means there will be more focus on near real-time, comprehensive reporting. If IT groups can’t clearly show the value of certain tools with reporting and metrics, they may opt to replace the solution.

• Go green + save green: It seems like everyone is talking about making IT “lean and green,” but many U.S. organizations don’t have a handle on their power consumption now. It’s key to understand this first before pursuing a path to cost reduction, and it will enable you to get a better handle on the specific areas you need to focus on to reduce costs. Creating a baseline will give you the framework to set short-term and long-term cost savings plans and monitoring. Focus on generating reports to project cost savings and ROI to secure an investment in Green IT.  A good place to look for potential big savings in your organization is in powering computers and other hardware. Many computers are in use less than 20% of the time, wasting both energy and money when they’re “powered on.”  A good power management solution will help you understand your current usage and recoup the power costs consumed by idle devices.  It will also help IT ensure compliance with current and future regulatory requirements, publish progress reports, and enable a larger pursuit of green initiatives.

While spending in 2010-2011 will go up, kicking off both new and delayed projects, we will continue to see the lasting effects of the economic crisis. Project plans and requirements will be more closely scrutinized, projecting and providing comprehensive reports on cost savings will be mandatory for any project, and CIOs will be more involved in the details.