EMERGING TECH
New Tech Acquisition Requires Strong Payback
Executives are more likely to sign off on emerging technology investments if they have a strong cost-cutting benefit. Process improvement remains the top corporate goal for these expenditures, but for executives to buy in, CIOs need to sell them on the savings aspect, according to our survey of IT business-technology leaders.

Economic uncertainty isn’t slowing the adoption of emerging technologies, despite the obvious risk involved and the usual lack of clear return-on-investment projections. The average share of the 2008 IT budget allocated to emerging technologies stayed even with 2007. And a majority of CIOs said their second-quarter spending would match first-quarter levels, when much of the economic uncertainty began to take hold. But it’s not all free-wheeling: More than three-quarters of CIOs said they’ll wait no longer than two years for their investments to break even.

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