Tech Budgets and Staffing Are in Transition

While overall IT budgets are going up, they account for noticeably less of organizations' total revenues compared with three years ago, according to a recent survey from the Global Institute for IT Management. In addition, findings reveal that CIOs have fewer internal, full-time IT employees than they did last year. The increasing outsourcing of IT personnel and hardware, software and facilities is helping to drive these trends. As reported here previously, there's also an increase in business units, such as sales and marketing, taking control of their own technology acquisitions and spending. In addition to the staffing and budget results, the survey sheds light on the daily life of CIOs, most of whom now report directly to their COO or CEO, rather than to the CFO. They also spend the vast majority of their time interacting with other organizational leaders and pursuing strategic initiatives instead of simply "running IT." This sense of greater purpose may contribute to a general state of job stability in the CIO position. CIOs and other technology leaders representing more than 2,500 global organizations took part in the research.