Allan Alter

Outsourcing may be commonplace, but it continues to confound IT executives’ expectations. Take the common myth that companies outsource to save money. Not only is this not true in half the cases, but our survey shows that most companies aren’t saving money by outsourcing. And that’s not the only surprise: Insourcing and outsourcing, though polar […]

8.6 percent—that’s how much it budgets at mid-market companies are increasing this year. Where’s the money going? Not to IT services—outsourcing budgets are nearly flat. Instead, companies with revenues between $5 million and $500 million are building up their own IT capabilities. They’re boosting their infrastructures even as they consolidate them, by investing in virtualization […]

Alan Kay is not a fan of the personal computer, though he did as much as anyone to create it. A winner of the Turing Prize, computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. After helping […]

Welcome to the most comprehensive report on IT spending CIO Insight has ever produced. Unlike previous years’ surveys, where we tracked only project-related spending on applications and infrastructure, we’ve asked respondents about any and all spending on these technologies. We’ve also broadened the field to 50 different technologies and services. With 429 respondents holding senior-level […]

Finding 1: IT Spending Is Rising Across the Board IT executives are optimistic about their company’s prospects: Four out of five respondents to our survey expect their company’s revenues to increase. And to help revenues grow, companies are boosting their IT budgets. The news this year is that large companies are increasing their IT spending […]

Finding 1 Customer Service Surges as a Top Priority for 2007 Upgrading infrastructure and improving processes remain high priorities. But many companies now appear to be ready to take it to the next level, by harnessing their improved technology platforms to build strategic applications and improve customer service. The move to better customer service is […]

Our future of IT survey has three parts: The first section covers the top business, managerial and technology priorities for 2007, the second presents the economic outlook as our respondents see it, and the rest presents a peek at where IT is heading. In the short term, IT executives are continuing to work on improving […]

It’s a classic East-meets-West scene: A Western visitor meets a Chinese businessman in a Beijing teahouse. Only in 2006, the teahouse is located in a shopping mall featuring a Starbucks and clothing stores from London’s Savile Row, and the discussion centers on LSU football. The Chinese businessman, John Zhang, is a Louisiana State University graduate; […]

Equal parts economist, professor, polemicist and politician, Robert Reich is quite unlike any other business thinker on the current public scene. These days, the former Labor Secretary under President Clinton is a professor of public policy at the University of California–Berkeley, National Public Radio commentator and sought-after public speaker. But in his spare time, Reich […]

CIO Insight‘s annual Vendor Value study had some surprising results this year. A newcomer to the list—CDW—takes first place, unseating Red Hat, which fell to third place. Yet while companies like Research In Motion, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix and Motorola improved their scores, the overall results indicate that CIO satisfaction with their vendors has waned significantly since […]