Tech Budgets Will Be Flat or Up in 09: CIO Trade Association

Most companies will spend as much or more on technology next year as they did last year, according to a recently released survey of IT professionals.

This is a crisis companies may spend their way out of, suggested Dr. Jerry Luftman, lead researcher for the Society for Information Management, which conducted the cross-industry survey. "This is a very different downturn from an IT perspective," he told BS&T. "In the past, IT was the first to be cut. Now, people are looking to leverage IT to reduce costs," he says.

SIM has 3,600 CTO/CIO members, one in six of whom work in financial services. Overall, about 300 members responded in June to SIM's annual survey.

Although responses were collected before the dramatic worsening of the crisis in Sept., Luftman is emphatic that the replies would not be different today. "No, we wouldn't get a different result. Even in June everybody was anticipating major problems," he told BS&T.

Nonetheless, "Most companies said they will spend the same of increase their tech budgets in '09 versus '08," he said. He was not in a position to readily cite percentages or say how SIM's financial services members, in particular, replied. Survey results were shared with SIM members at its annual conference in mid-November.