But throughout the business world, companies will need to increase spending on items such as PCs because many of them have significantly delayed upgrading as part of their efforts to cope with the poor economic conditions of the past few years. Storage upgrades also will represent an area of significant investment. Eighty-eight percent of survey respondents say PCs are on their planned-project lists for 2004, 60% cite storage area networks, and 52% enterprise storage systems.
"I don't see necessarily that people are waiting for times to get better and then they'll plop down a whole pile of money, although the IT industry would like to think differently," Bonner says. "A lot of companies, however, have delayed discretionary spending on technology and will eventually grow at a gradual rate."
One such example is Texas Instruments' use of internally developed customer-relationship-management software for mobile workers. Improvements in worker mobility will be an important area of investment this year, Bonner says. The goal is to increase the productivity of the company's mobile sales force without investing in a major software implementation, he says.
Productivity is important to almost all Outlook respondents; 90% say boosting worker productivity is a business priority in 2004. Existing productivity efforts seem to be paying off, with nearly three-quarters of respondents saying their companies were more productive in 2003 than in the previous year.
At automaker DaimlerChrysler AG, the IT budget has been flat for several years, but CIO Sue Unger says she thinks that's when tech departments do some of their best work. "IT shops are better off when times are a little tough because it forces them to look at how they can become more efficient internally," she says.
DaimlerChrysler's IT department worked with each company division to look at key projects scheduled for this year and then created a prioritized implementation plan. One of the biggest projects: upgrading to the latest version of Dassault Systemes SA's Catia product-design system. Catia lets engineers create digital versions of vehicle designs and the factory layouts needed to build them. The software will be a key part of DaimlerChrysler's digital-manufacturing platform, which lets engineers create a virtualized factory so they can offer instantaneous feedback on the manufacturing implications of new design considerations.
