Your company's most expensive technology project may not be its most critical one. According to Baseline's Top 5 Projects survey of 1,269 readers, application integration was the biggest category in terms of average expected spending ($12.1 million for 2005). But when we asked which single technology "most critically" impacts their company, business process management emerged as the No. 1 choice. And two Top 5 Projects—business analytics and enterprise portals—weren't in the top 10 of the single most critical technologies, despite their sizable price tags.
We also compared top projects by companies' overall spending on information technology. The 628 respondents in the Big Spenders group (organizations planning to invest $10 million or more on information technologies in the next 12 months) are putting the most dollars toward application integration, business analytics and customer relationship management. Small Spenders (641 respondents) share six of the same top 10 projects as their bigger cousins: application integration, application consolidation, business analytics, financial reporting, intrusion detection and prevention, and desktop upgrades. But clearly, the hefty budgets of the Big Spenders more strongly influenced the overall rankings.
Top 10 Critical Projects
Single technology that "most critically impacts" your company in 2005
Projects - Average Planned Spending
1. Business process management - 8.2%
2. Intrusion detection and prevention - 5.7
3. Supply chain - 5.1
4. Server upgrades - 4.9
5. Application integration - 4.8
6. Customer relationship management - 4.3
7. Identity and access management - 3.9
8. Financial reporting - 3.4
9. Data management - 3.3
10. Application consolidation - 3.2
Big Spenders
Top 10 Projects
Average spending planned on different initiatives by companies planning to spend more than $10M in the next 12 months on information technologies
Projects - Average Planned Spending
1. Application integration - $22,117,000
2. Business analytics - 17,412,000
3. Customer relationship management - 15,442,000
4. Enterprise portals - 12,262,000
5. Desktop upgrades - 11,358,000
6. Intrusion detection and prevention - 9,528,000
7. Voice-over-IP - 9,018,000
8. Financial reporting - 8,905,000
9. Server upgrades - 8,794,000
10. Application consolidation - 8,475,000
Small Spenders
Top 10 Projects
Average spending planned on different initiatives by companies planning to spend less than $10M in the next 12 months on information technologies
Projects - Average Planned Spending
1. Performance management - $1,696,000
2. Mobile devices - 1,621,000
3. Financial reporting - 1,522,000
4. Business process management - 1,311,000
5. Intrusion detection and prevention - 1,007,000
6. Application consolidation - 948,000
7. Application integration - 695,000
8. Business analytics - 590,000
9. Systems management - 536,000
10. Desktop upgrades - 526,000
Projects: Management 
