Upgrade cautiously as the economy edges north

Economic recovery is on our writers' minds this week as three articles touch on the question of what tasks IT should tackle as budgets slowly grow.

That the economy is improving now seems undeniable, although its pace will remain a matter of debate in this election season. Even corporate tech spending is returning: Aberdeen Group, Gartner, and IDC foresee IT budget growth of between 4 percent and 8 percent in 2004, depending on how the year unfolds.

No one expects a rerun of the free-spending 1990s. In this issue alone, InfoWorld Test Center Technical Director Tom Yager cautions against needless upgrades and CTO Chad Dickerson celebrates the discipline of a unified IT strategy.

Perhaps the most telling snapshot of IT’s rebirth, however, comes from the feature story “Seven ways to prepare for the economic upturn.” The article stems from a survey of senior technology executives at more than three dozen companies, many of them members of the InfoWorld CTO Advisory Council. Dan Tynan distills their advice into seven specific lessons that tech executives may find useful in navigating the year ahead -- including several that bear on spending priorities.

For starters, the CTOs give only mild endorsement to the infrastructure upgrades that most companies are contemplating. Aging systems and software should be modernized only where there is clear business benefit, they say -- a view that echoes Yager’s.

The CTOs are similarly cautious about embracing new technology -- presumably because of lessons learned during the frenetic build-out of the late '90s. Yet they will pounce on innovations that can sharply reduce expenses, such as VoIP (voice over IP) phone systems, Linux migration, wireless networking, and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags for inventory and shipping control.

The CTOs note that they increasingly must be "salespeople" within their own companies for the projects they consider important. And they argue that the best way to sell an idea is to drive the agenda by anticipating the company’s technology needs before those needs become problems.

I had the privilege of presenting some of these results to a meeting of the New York CTO Club last week. The presentation included interesting data from a recent InfoWorld study showing, for example, that IT execs are feeling more pressure to make the right purchasing decision the first time and thus are evaluating more products and vendor alternatives than they did only three or four years ago.

Not five minutes into the talk, a hand shot up. "I’ve worked in IT for three decades," the speaker said, "and while what you’re describing is definitely new today, it’s also a return to the way we did IT for years before the 1990s bubble."

Point well taken! And all the more reason to check out the CTOs' timely and time-tested advice.