CIOs throughout the UK believe that reducing expenditure will be their top priority over the next three years, according to new research from modernisation vendor Micro Focus.
Nearly half (43%) of the CIOs quizzed said that cost cutting tops the priority list for the foreseeable future, compared to 26% of their US peers and 17% in Germany. Half of the respondents said that they’d had their IT budgets cut this year.
With these restrictions in place the need to do ‘more with less’ is key for CIOs, who are under pressure to deliver fast, tangible ROI on technology projects.
“One of the abiding themes of our research for the last decade has been ‘More for Less’ – first in private sector IT and now very much the key topic in the public sector too. Saving money on IT doesn’t have to mean throwing everything away and starting again. Doing things in a more intelligent manner is often a smarter move,” said Richard Holway, chairman of analyst firm TechMarketView.
The survey also revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly given the market Micro Focus operates in, that 63% of CIOs believe that application modernisation is key to reducing outgoings. The majority (86%) said that they are either currently working on a modernisation project or had recently finished one.
“Application modernisation has clearly been the unsung trend of the IT industry over the last 12 months, and is set to remain so for the immediate future. And with large projects realising tangible savings of millions of pounds in just a few years it is easy to see why,” said Stuart McGill, CTO, Micro Focus.
“CIOs and IT professionals are being asked to do two things at once: cut even more costs and innovate to meet customer demands. They should remember that the savings they make by migrating their mainframe applications to more modern architectures can actually be reinvested into new projects, so they can in fact achieve both aims at the same time,” he said.
Content from our partners
