The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!

“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”

The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:

“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”

IT budget projections from McKinsey

According to McKinsey’s survey (results available here), while operating budgets are largely expected to continue at the reduced levels of 2009, the story for new investments tells a more cautiously optimistic story. More than 45 percent of respondents expect to increase investments, while about 20 percent see them holding steady. Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away (back in 2007, 69 percent were predicting increased investments for 2008), but it does point to a return to more strategic considerations for IT.

There are some interesting industry variations – with Financial Services leading the pack in making investments (61 percent expecting to increase new investments, up from 40 percent last year).

Reasons why from Gartner

Gartner’s recent CIO research paints a similar picture (”2010 IT budgets are projected to be flat increasing by a weighted global average of 1.3 percent in nominal terms, compared with 2009 levels where IT budgets declined 8.1 percent”). The main thrust of Gartner’s opinion seems to be that we’re moving from cost-cutting priorities to a drive for productivity gains. These gains are about opening up to fresh thinking, smart innovations – but not massive costs…

“These productivity gains will come from collaborative and innovative solutions that take advantage of the new “lighter-weight” services-based and social media technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing.”

If we thought that IT decision-makers were open to outside ideas when it came to making massive cost reductions in the IT budget, that may pale to insignificance compared to their thirst for insight around these ‘lighter-weight’ smarter-thinking options.

Change in action at the BBC, Deutsche Bank and Barclays

Three big changes in technology strategy in January seem to support the argument that 2009 was a year of significant strategic thinking going on in the background, and that this year we will see investments begin to catch-up.

First, Computing reports on the BBC’s strategy roadmap for technology over the next two to five years. The BBC’s CTO John Linwood supports Gartner’s recommendation of lighter-weight technology: “broadcast systems need to be increasingly agile, flexible and able to adapt quickly to new demands.” As we’ve seen several times already, standardisation will be one of the buzzwords of 2010, and the BBC report continues this theme: “The BBC must strive for further standardisation in the technology solutions it employs to minimise the overall costs and maximise re-use. The use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies and solutions should be the preferred option. Whilst specific customisation is necessary it must be done consciously and when commercial off the shelf offerings have been evaluated.” 

Next, we have the New Statesman’s coverage of Deutsche Bank’s plans to replace various solutions with a single new core banking system from SAP: “The SAP implementation shall underpin the bank’s strategy to push for a high degree of industrialization and standardization of processes. The bank is also looking to achieve flexibility in its IT infrastructure, building on standardized, modular SAP software functions within a SOA.”

Finally, an interesting report on Barclays from Computer Weekly describes how the bank is taking a number of outsourced contracts back in house. Following the decision in December to bring the management of desktop systems back in house, last week saw the decision not to renew the application development contract with Accenture. It’s open to speculation on which factors were most important of cost, flexibility, business alignment, control…

So three very different stories to start the year – all the combination of a long time thinking and justifying investments that are now coming on-line. We can expect to see more changes in direction as other businesses follow suit and place their bets for the recovery – and by 2011 we may well be sick of the words standardisation, flexibility and productivity…