Survey: CIOs Project Increased 2011 Spending

Over the holiday weekend, we helped a Maven Client learn more about current trends in information technology and the challenges and opportunities facing Chief Information Officers. Using Maven’s automated Electronic Survey system, we took a quick snapshot of current sentiment from 20 CIOs from organizations of various sizes around the world.

The Client who commissioned the Survey has graciously allowed us to share some of the quantitative results with you, in particular the CIOs’ projections of how their 2011 IT spending will compare to 2010. First let’s take a look at some demographic information about our respondents:

As you can see, the respondents came from a variety of company sizes ranging from 50 to more than 10,000 employees. The distribution was more or less even across the various company size categories we identified, although unfortunately we didn’t get any responses in the 5k – 10k range this time around.

In addition, approximately three-quarters of the respondents reside in the United States, with the remainder coming from Australia, Canada, France, Holland, South Africa, and Spain.

We asked the CIOs how much their organizations spent on IT products and services in 2010. Here are the results:

Once again a nice distribution, including organizations with relatively small (<$500k) 2010 budgets up to those with HUGE (>$100M) budgets.

Finally, we asked the CIOs to project how their 2011 spending will compare to 2010:

The responses skew to the positive, indicating that most of our respondents expect flat or slightly higher spending this year vs. last year. None plan for significant cuts, whereas a few plan to increase their spending by 25% or more.

The Survey also asked the CIOs their opinions on specific companies with whom they do business, products they use (or want to us), and the key challenges they face. This qualitative data pointed to some very interesting trends, including a massive push toward cloud services and mobility, and a heavy deemphasis of fixed computing assets (desktops and workstations). Specific questions included:

• Over the next 3 years do you expect your company’s IT spending to increase, decrease, or stay about the same? Why do you expect this?
• What new IT products and services most interest you and why?
• Have you evaluated any new IT products or services recently. If so, which ones and what were your impressions of them?
• Name one IT product or service company that you believe is doing a particularly good job meeting your needs and one company that could use improvement. Please explain.
• In your opinion, what is the most important issue facing Chief Information Officers (or those in similar roles) today? Discuss how you expect this to evolve in the future.

If you are interested in viewing the full results, please contact Maven for more details.