This Is Why Your IT Budget Is Shrinking

Alright, we know — your IT budget is shrinking because corporations are staffed by soul-sucking monsters that value dollar signs above absolutely everything else, sanity included. But another key factor is that money that was once assigned to centralised IT is now often ending up in individual departments instead.

Pie picture from Shutterstock

New data from Telsyte’s Australian Digital Workplace Study for 2015 suggests that 22 per cent of all IT spending by Australian businesses is made outside the IT department. If you have a corporate credit card, it’s not hard to have a couple of hundred dollars of expenses for software-as-a-service signed off without ever going through a formal IT process. “Today’s operations and marketing managers rely on technology to deliver business outcomes and the CIO is no longer the source of all procurement decisions,” Telsyte analyst Rodney Gedda said in a statement announcing the report’s release.

There’s a benefit to this approach (faster procurement) but also a significant risk (lack of integration with other business processes, ignorance of security issues). One way of reducing that risk is to assign departments their own individual budgets, something which now apparently happens to some extent in 79 per cent of Australian organisations, Telsyte found.

One more cheering piece of news? More than half the CIOs surveyed expect to hire more people this year. Time to work out your salary expectations.


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