IT Budget and Staff Forecast Misses Expectations

Most of us read the annual projections about information technology budgeting and staffing, but rarely do we get a comprehensive look at how those projections actually play out. IT staffing and services provider TEKsystems hopes to change that with new quarterly "reality checks" in which it will follow-up on its annual IT Forecast throughout the year. The company just released the first such "reality check" to see how IT leaders' expectations for 2014 are playing out. The results indicate that respondents to the year-end survey were a bit more bullish than they should have been. TEKsystems checked in with more than one-fourth of the original 900 respondents, and found that budgets are more meager and staffing flatter than they had expected at the end of last year. It also found that confidence in IT may be wavering, and that technology skills—and the trends that drive them—are somewhat in flux. “Our Annual IT Forecast represents views for the entire year of 2014, so it’s interesting to see how close reality is tracking to those expectations as we exit the first quarter,” said TEKsystems Research Manager Jason Hayman. “To date, it appears that budget optimism was a little overstated, and it has impacted initial hiring. … It will be interesting to see how conditions continue to develop, either falling in line with or skewing further away from expectations, and how organizations will adapt to realities throughout the course of the year.” A summary of the updated findings follows.