IT Budget and Staff Forecast Misses Expectations
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Budget Forecast (end of 2013)
62% of respondents expected a budget increase, 26% expected the budget to stay the same, 12% expected the budget to shrink -
Budget Reality (March 31)
47% said budget had increased (down 15%), 38% said budget had stayed the same (up 12% rise), 15% said budget had shrunk (up 3%) -
Keeping the Faith
At the end of 2013, 66% of respondents had confidence in IT's ability to meet business demands. As of March 31, 72% were confident. -
Fading Faith
At the end of 2013, 6% of respondents lacked confidence in IT's ability to meet business demands. As of March 31, 12% lacked such confidence. -
Staffing Challenges (end of 2013)
The IT jobs hardest to fill at the end of 2013 were programmers/application developers, architects and software engineers. -
Staffing Challenges (March 31)
The most difficult IT positions to fill as of March 31 were programmers/applications developers, security and business intelligence/big data. -
IT Trends With Biggest Impact
At the end of 2013: Business intelligence/big data, security, mobility. As of March 31: Mobility, security, cloud computing -
Contingent Workers
At the end of 2013, contingent workers made up 22% of IT staffs. As of March 31, contingent workers made up 23% of IT staffs. -
Flatter Hiring of Permanent Staff
At the end of 2013, 47% expected permanent IT staff to increase, and 44% expected no change. As of March 31, 35% of permanent IT staffs had grown, and 56% experienced no changes. -
Flatter Hiring of Contingent Worker s
At the end of 2013, 46% expected contingent IT staff to increase, and 43% expected no change. As of March 31, 35% of contingent IT staffs had grown, 54% were unchanged.
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.