. . . Larry was right

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Fortune 1000 companies report they are having to increase spending on IT maintenance and repairs at the expense of productivity-boosting IT systems.

This is despite a 9 percent average increase in IT budgets in 2004.

Accenture surveyed CIOs at 300 Fortune 1000 companies.

Larry Ellison must be smiling.



More from the Accenture study:

The quest to contain spending on information technology (IT) frequently backfires, forcing companies and governments to instead increase expenditures on IT maintenance, repairs and other unproductive practices.
. . .
Survey respondents cited an inability to close the gap between goals and results, despite average IT spending increases of 9 percent last year.
. . .
More than half of CIOs (55 percent) report that their organizations prefer to follow, not lead when it comes to pioneering IT developments, letting others absorb the costs and risks of initial development or category creation. Yet the majority of high-performing IT organizations (77 percent) said they want to be early adopters.
. . .
Technology adoption appears strongest in compliance areas, while weakest in business improvement technologies.
. . .
High-performing IT organizations spend 40 percent more of their budget on building and integrating new systems than low performing IT organizations.
. . .
The average IT organization spends about 12 percent of its time fixing preventable problems; high performers in contrast spend only 5 percent of their time fixing, where low performers spend 16 percent.