Positive changes

Despite the pause in the economy this fall, there’s ample evidence that the economic expansion remains strong — especially so for information technology.

The latest data come from two just-completed surveys of InfoWorld readers. The surveys, titled “Leading the Renewal” and “The New Dynamics of Marketing,” were designed to assess, respectively, the nature of the IT recovery and the challenges of marketing in this environment. Each brought responses from more than 800 InfoWorld readers, roughly one-third of them business managers and the rest in IT. Here are some highlights.

Business is expanding and IT is fueling that growth. Fully 76 percent of respondents expect their companies to grow during the next 12 months, and 78 percent say IT is more responsible for that business performance than it was just a few years ago.

Companies are investing more in IT but not yet for headcount. Some 58 percent say the level of IT spending at their companies will rise during the next year versus only 35 percent who expect it to remain the same. Yet when asked whether they’ll be able to hire more IT staff, only 33 percent expect to do so. As one respondent put it, the attitude at his company has “changed from ‘make do with what we have’ … to ‘get what we need to do the job right.’ “Yet the gains are expected to come from “more automation, less manual work, [and] work[ing] smarter not harder,” as another said — not from more people.

Companies are eager to adopt new technologies that make sense for the business. When asked which emerging technologies were most attractive, 85 percent or more of respondents said they were either using or might evaluate Web services, mobile/wireless, and application-layer firewalls in the coming year. VoIP and 64-bit computing also scored strongly. RFID earned similar comments from only 56 percent of respondents, whereas grid computing was cited by only 52 percent.

InfoWorld readers are driving this change. That’s no surprise to you (or us), perhaps, but it’s interesting to see the numbers. A whopping 95 percent actively advocate IT solutions for business problems at their companies, and 37 percent are the primary advocates. One respondent joked that his role requires “dragging the business unit along kicking and screaming,” and another noted that “numerous people come up with ‘cool, new ideas,’ [but] I focus on items that can make/break our continued existence.” An amazingly high 81 percent have made a purchase decision based on specific information from InfoWorld during the past year.

For more about the surveys, please drop me an e-mail. In the meantime, it’s reassuring to hear that our readers continue to lead the good fight.