A third of IT managers in the UK are trying to convince their organisation’s directors to invest more in technology, following a tough year of budget cuts in many firms.
According to research from service and asset management provider Numara Software, some 30 percent state it is in the IT department’s interest to continually push for more cash. The same proportion have serious concerns that IT budgets will never go back to what they were before the current economic problems.
Four in 10 said their budgets had been cut since the recession began, which many found “personally demotivating”. Many also lamented the fact that when things go wrong following a lack of investment “it is still the head of IT who picks up the blame”.
Fifty five percent said new IT projects were being held back by lack of investment, and over a third stated that more senior executives were now required to sign off any projects. The research, of 100 UK IT managers, was conducted by Dynamic Markets.
Budget cuts and the ever-increasing complexity of IT were also affecting seven in 10 businesses’ ability to track their assets, particularly as many saw tracking as “time consuming” and “labour intensive”.
One third struggled to track mobile data outside the traditional company network perimeter. Nearly all said it was important to have flexible asset tracking systems in place.
Andy White, managing director at Numara Software, said organisations needed to keep track of their “real costs”, including licensing, if they wanted to keep budgets down. Businesses, he said, “need to have an idea of what’s in their IT estate”, partly through using discovery tools.
Tracking issues in turn affected how IT departments kept pace with service desk enquiries, the survey found. Managers felt pressure from the need to maintain users’ calm and productivity, the need to keep customer experience positive and from efforts to maintain a good image for the IT department.