Fleisher told the audience of 6,000 IT professionals that the days of cost cutting and control are not over, but are fading as the main preoccupation of IT and business executives. He cited indications of increased IT spending to distinguish his optimistic forecast from wishful thinking.
"Cost cutting will remain important, but it will no longer be your chief executive's number one priority. Innovation to support growth will emerge as your chief executive's number one priority," Fleisher said. Gartner predicted IT spending would increase about 5 percent per year through 2005 and take off in 2006.
If innovation means getting more leverage out of existing IT investments and taking practical steps toward new platforms like Web services and virtualising infrastructure resources, then I agree with Fleisher's assessment. It's not a return to the unbridled IT spending of the 1990's on whiteboard concepts, but involves looking for strategic opportunities to apply technology or process innovations to drive efficiencies and profitability. In other words, the ROI must be demonstrable and within a reasonable timeframe.
On the cost-control side, Fleisher mentioned the usual suspects -- outsourcing non-strategic functions, standardising infrastructure components and cutting down the number of vendors and technologies -- as key ongoing trends. However, any desire to control costs without considering the big picture is a dead end. The goal of creating a more a standards-based infrastructure, for example, should be undertaken to pave the way for the next generation of computing, not just for cutting costs. And, Fleisher noted that cost cutting and innovation will be parallel paths taken by leading enterprises, but that there will be more of an emphasis on innovating than on cost cutting in the next few years.
In a session focusing on the future of IT, Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Al Lill drilled down on the technologies that would drive a massive resurgence in innovation during the next decade. They predicted that the next generation of computing, built around service-oriented software architecture and always-on communications, would reach fruition in the 2006 to 2009 timeframe.
