According to a new survey conducted by Coleman Parkes including 500 C suite information technology professionals working at organizations with a minimum of 1,000 employees (U.S.; U.K.; France; Germany; Turkey), respondents expect IT budgets to grow by a whopping 27 percent in 2024.
Parenthetically, the report says 2022 respondents overestimated their projected spending by 10 percent. And while it is always possible that this particular sample is unusual in some way, such year over year increases or decreases in IT budgets do not tend to reach those reported levels.
Also, an increase in IT spending of that magnitude would be hugely out of step with trends of the past few years. Rates of growth in past immediate decades probably was higher because spending was growing from a smaller base.
A reasonable assessment is that IT spending as a percentage of firm revenue has increased since 1980, to support the use of personal computers; the internet; the web; enterprise software innovations; cloud computing and mobility; cybersecurity and now preparation for artificial intelligence.
But even optimistic forecasts have topped out between 12 percent and 14 percent expected increases in IT spend as a percentage of revenue in past decades, and even those boosts can be characterized as outliers.
It might also be fair to note that almost all forecasting tends to be optimistic, for IT or any other product, in any other industry.
The point is that the self-reported claims of expected increases in IT budgets are enough out of character with recent trends, and with longer-term trends, as to be suspect. In life and business, it often makes sense to note what people and firms actually do, not what they say they will do.
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