Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction Biggest Beefs Flat Budgets But High Hopes User Feedback Details, Details So You Think You Have It Bad...

We sent our e-mail survey to 59,000 readers, and 2,647 of you took the time to respond. (Trust us, that's a pretty darn statistically relevant percentage, especially with such a well-targeted group.) We received responses from IT staffers, managers and midlevel executives, and corporate execs. The pool was split mostly between IT staff (about 55 percent) and management (42 percent). We talked to one CFO of a 30-person firm who is the IT department. He even refills the paper tray when the printer runs low!

Company size also was evenly distributed. A third of respondents work for firms with 100 or fewer employees, and a little less than a third work for companies with 101 to 1,000 employees. The rest (38 percent) work for firms with more than 1,000 employees, with 8 percent saying their companies have more than 50,000 employees.

More than a third of respondents gave Network Computing editors permission to follow up and interview them further. We grilled readers with backgrounds in health care, state government, education, social services, professional services, real estate, distribution and manufacturing about how IT decisions are made in their organizations and how business managers and IT staffers interact. We also tapped the braintrust for their predictions of the top technology trends for 2003.

The poll was posted on the Web from April 24 to May 29, 2002. Links to the poll were posted on nwc.com and in the April 29 and May 13 issues of Network Computing. Also, a personalized e-mail with an embedded link to the poll was sent to approximately 59,000 Network Computing subscribers, offering respondents the chance to win an MP3 player. After removing invalid responses, the sample contained 2,647 valid, completed surveys. The survey is projectable to U.S. corporations with a margin of error of +/-1.9 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.