2012 Budget, Salary Projections Revealed by Society of Information Management Survey

With organizations beginning to focus on their 2012 budgets, findings from a survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM) are timely indeed.

In last year’s survey of CIOs, “business productivity and cost reduction” was at the top of the list of concerns. This year, that dropped to fourth place. In the lead: “IT and business alignment,” followed by “business agility and speed to market” and “business process management and reengineering.”

There’s good news for IT professionals in the survey results, which found that 34 percent of the 275 CIOs answering the survey plan to keep their budgets the same and 51 percent said they will increase them in 2012. The survey found that 83 percent of respondents said their IT budget was equal to or the same as their 2010 actuals (money actually spent last year).

Also good news: 94 percent said staff salaries will remain the same or increase next year. Staff turnover remains about the same over the three years; year to date it stands at 7.06 percent, down from 7.10 last year and below the seven-year average of 7.46 percent. IT staff salaries overall increased over 2010’s salaries at 66 percent of organizations, remained the same at a quarter (26 percent), and declined at 8 percent. That pattern is projected to be similar next year; 67 percent of participants say salaries will rise in 2012, 27 percent say they’ll remain the same, and 6 percent expect them to decline.

Not so great news: the percent of corporate revenue allocated to IT’s budget has dropped to 3.55 percent this year from 3.87 percent last year, though it’s still near to the seven-year average of 3.68 percent.

What has IT been spending its money on so far this year? Business intelligence is the top of the list, followed by cloud computing, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, mobile and wireless applications, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The latter two are new this year to the top 5.

Jeffy Luftman, a distinguished professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and the lead researcher for the survey, will present the full survey results at SIM’s annual conference, SIMposium, in November. Details are here.

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 10/11/2011