Research out late last week highlighted that 25% of companies were increasing their IT investment, despite the economic volatility. The survey of US IT professionals by ISACA also found that only 16% of companies were making across the board cuts in IT, with 14% freezing them at current levels.

“Many organisations are trying to avoid making widespread cuts in IT because of growing awareness that IT, when implemented strategically, has the potential to deliver tremendous business value.” said Robert Stroud, International VP of ISACA.

The full research release is here.

IT analyst TechMarketView’s bulletin this morning reporting on Ernst & Young’s ASAPTech event was fascinating. It reports comments made by John Suffolk, Her Majesty’s Government’s Chief Information Officer for Transformational Government, giving his views on how IT vendors should work with Government.

Amongst the varied comments from the Government’s most senior IT man (covering his views on Cloud through to offshoring), the major line that stood out for me was the comment that “the average tender process takes 76 weeks and vendors can spend up to £10m on their bids.”

With the recession biting, and government being the spender of last resort, IT government projects are being eyed up by even more vendors than ever before. Clearly these bids can chew up years and millions. For marketers, it’s important to have a very solid account-based and bid-winning focus.

You can read Anthony Miller’s full write up of Suffolk’s comments here on TechMarketView’s website.

Citi has just released a survey it carried out in Nov/Dec 08 on 2009 CIO budgets. The 200 CIOs (split between the U.S. and Europe) said that they expect budgets to fall for the first time in five years -  US CIOs are expecting IT budgets to fall 2.7 % in 2009, European CIOs are seeing decline of a more modest 1.9 %. Useful information on spending priorities (server consolidation, security) and possible areas of cutback are also covered.

…This time from the SME market, where ChannelWeb.co.uk reports on CompTIA’s research.  56% of UK SMEs plan to increase their IT budgets in the next 12 months, with a focus on IT security, and the number of UK firms planning to increase spend has grown to 56% from 54% last year (while the percentage of US firms planning to invest more has dropped from 64% to 52%).

Other interesting stats out recently highlight that there is slowing growth in the services market (IDC), whilst Silicon says that Datamonitor is showing spending growth in healthcare:

“Lloyds TSB has named Mark Fisher – currently overseeing the integration of ABM Amro into the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – as director of group IT and operations.

“Fisher will join next year as a member of the group executive committee (GEC) of the newly named Lloyds Banking Group to head the integration of high street rival HBOS.” http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19229

…this time a quite positive (surely not) report on IT spending’s prospects. And not in a “we have to stay positive” way, but in a “IT spending won’t go down too much because it is already fairly sensible, and IT will be key in reducing other costs” way. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2229263/recession-bad

Or… Tower Group’s view today that the UK government’s bank bail out it will create a two-tier spending system. http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19221

As I argued a couple of weeks ago, the only way to really understand this is to get out there and speak directly to customers – then build 2009 sales-aligned marketing programmes that address their needs and fit their plans.

An article by Paul Taylor in the FT recently claims that companies have spent too much on propping up and maintaining existing systems for ever-decreasing productivity gains. He argues, with the support of a recent PwC report, that the next cycle of IT value creation will lay in the function’s ability to support business process innovation.

“IT innovation is the chief casualty of this preoccupation with system maintenance. In 2007, only 13 per cent of the average IT budget supported innovation in business processes or products. The remaining 87 per cent disappeared into the black hole of general maintenance and upkeep.”

“The PwC report suggests that the ability of chief information officers and IT managers to break these long established spending patterns and support business process innovation instead, will be the most important factor for improving IT value and productivity.”