CIO Innovation Budgets Are Increasing
by Peter High, published on Forbes
11-17-2014
A CEB survey of 166 IT executives determined that 33 percent of the 2014 IT budget is categorized as “business opportunity and innovation.” CEB defines business opportunity as “Investments that deliver new capabilities that drive the realization of business benefits; typically involve initiatives that expand your organization’s current line of business (e.g., a new customer-facing system).” Innovation is defined as “Transformative sources of competitive advantage; investment returns are typically hard to measure; typically involve initiatives that are outside your organization’s current line of business, (e.g., a system for sharing competitive intelligence).” This is up from 31 percent of the budget for 2013.
This is an encouraging sign that is indicative of optimism IT leaders have, the greater role that they play in innovation generally, but CEB assesses that it is also partially driven by the reduction in the share of the budget allocated to maintenance spending, which is at 57 percent in 2014 compared to 63 percent in 2011.
Another striking finding from the survey is that those IT departments that allocate a larger share of their budget to innovation and business opportunity – over 40% of budget – do not have more staff on average, and often have lower budgets overall, indicating that they can do more with less.
