Half of US Companies Plan to Increase IT Spending in 2012

Half of US companies plan to invest more on IT resources in 2012 than in 2011, according to a new survey by Nucleus Research. In fact, 10 percent of the companies surveyed are planning an increase of 10 percent or greater. A mere one out of 10 companies plan to decrease spending next year.

Nucleus expects to see continued investment in areas including CRM, integration, business intelligence and analytics, and workforce management. Software in particular is more flexible than ever, representing one of the only investments that can provide both cost containment and revenue growth opportunities.

Five Ways to Improve IT Spending

In the survey report, Nucleus also identifies ways to improve IT spending, including:

-- Move applications to the cloud: Nucleus has found typical companies can redeploy 15 to 25 percent of their overall IT personnel budget by moving applications to the cloud.

-- Move custom applications to the bottom of the list: Today commercially-developed and supported applications typically meet at least 80 percent of requirements.

-- Get real about asset management: A recent Nucleus survey found that 42 percent of companies made unnecessary software or hardware purchases that could have been avoided if they had access to more accurate data about their applications.

-- Cut custom report writing: Custom report writing is costly, time consuming, and often lags behind the need for the answers business users are trying to solve.

-- Eliminate IT training: If an enterprise application is so unintuitive that it requires training, vendor-provided training should be part of the purchase agreement.

More information on IT spending can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com.