Gartner analyst Mark McDonald looks at the declining budgets in IT departments over the years and explores the reasons behind it. IT has been forced to do more with less recently, undermining its effectiveness as a supporting pillar of the enterprise.
He looks specifically at the role of the CIO and how, under financial pressure, they’ve trimmed the budgets of their IT departments. But this devlaulation has been a “silent killer,” he says, “eating away at the health of IT in ways that do not become apparent until IT is ready to collapse.”
“Governance, service level agreements, service catalogues, shared services, etc. are some of the tools used to devalue IT by shifting resources within the IT budget. Its like the old commercial, IT has starving the investment fever to feed the operational cold.”
In a world dominated by “lightweight” technologies like SaaS, cloud services and powerful mobile applications, McDonald says it would be unwise to start giving IT big budgets again; instead, their role in the enterprise should be reimagined.