Forrester's 3.7% Spending Benchmark

Forrester's latest IT MOOSE spending benchmarking study breaks down the data by industry and company size, from 2.6 percent for the retail/wholesale sector to 8.2 percent for financial services. These figures do not include spending on new initiatives. (The report, entitled US IT Spending Benchmarks For 2007, was written by Andrew H. Bartels).

IT spending is likely to decrease, according to a survey of 112 IT executives who attended the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week. The survey, conducted by Capgemini U.S., found that 91 percent expect an economic downturn and 42 percent believe IT budgets will increase. But they were more bullish about SOA: 46 percent described Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) as a technology for improved integration, 42 percent as a way of organizing the business and redesigning business processes, and only 12 percent suggested Service-Orientation is vendor hype. (Watch for CIO Insight's "Future of IT" study, which will also offer predictions of IT spending in 2008.)

If some of your IT budget is going to knowledge management, take a look at an article on the Knowledge@Wharton Web site. Wharton management professor Martine Haas and Morten Hansen, professor of entrepreneurship at INSEAD, indicates that knowledge-sharing efforts often fail to result in improved task outcomes inside organizations -- and may even hurt project performance. However, organizations that plan carefully before launching a knowledge-sharing initiative, and support these efforts along the way, have a much better chance of adding value, the researchers say. "Companies and other organizations are spending large sums of money to capture and disseminate their stores of knowledge," she notes. "But a significant number are not getting the full value of their investment. In fact, project teams that are badly designed or use the wrong type of knowledge for their task can see their performance suffer rather than improve as a result of efforts to use knowledge from other parts of the organization."

Professor Robert Nickerson of San Francisco State University has just gathered together replies to a request for information about declining IT enrollment at universities. The responses can be found here. No good news here: Rick Mathieu of James Madison University in Virginia looked at degrees granted across the state, and writes "most of the major drops in student graduation in IT:1) appear to have hit only in the last 2 years; 2) appear to have hit IS/MIS much harder than CS [computer science]". Geoffrey Dick of the Australian School of Business includes this except from an October 2007 article in the Journal of Information Systems Education: "It is not unusual to hear cases of enrollment declines of over 70 percent.... Throughout the United States, there has been a decrease in enrollments that ranges from 25 to 75 percent."

Finally, if a crime is committed in a virtual world, do you call the virtual cops? Several academic researchers have been wondering about it. David S. Wall of the University of Leeds and Matthew L. Williams of the University of Wales' Cardiff School of Social Sciences recently teamed up to write a study. "Policing Diversity in the Digital Age: Maintaining Order in Virtual Communities," published in the journal Criminology & Criminal Justice, contrasts online reputation management systems, "virtual" police services and vigilante groups that employ "online shaming," with offline policing and criminal justice processes. And Arno R. Lodder of the Free University of Amsterdam's Computer/Law Institute has been investigating how "online dispute resolution" could work on Web sites such as Second Life.

Posted by Allan Alter on November 19, 2007 8:32 AM