By the Numbers: October 2003

Tight Pocketbooks Find Room for E-Business

As information technology budgets shrink, e-business initiatives continue to gain a bigger piece of the pie, according to an annual study by Line56 Media and A.T. Kearney Inc. The 150 companies surveyed will spend an average of $42.6 million on e-business in 2003, which represents 20.3% of their total technology budgets.

Big-ticket items include such traditional investments as server hardware and software and enterprise resource planning applications. Overall, e-business spending will increase 5.2% in 2003 from the year before, but the survey predicts a more cautious 2.5% hike in 2004.

Who’s Hiring?

Bears won’t be alone in hibernation this winter. Only 9% of CIOs will add staff in Q4 2003, according to a survey by Robert Half Technology. While 4% expect to trim staff, the remaining 87% plan no change. One bright spot: the East South Central region (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee), where 15% of CIOs expect to do some hiring.

Certifiably Lower

The median pay for individuals with technical certifications is 7.7% higher than for those lacking them, says Foote Partners LLC. But pay in many areas, such as networking and application development, is waning, even so.

Watch Your I.D.

An estimated 27.3 million Americans have been victimized by an identity theft incident in the past five years, including 9.9 million last year, according to a Federal Trade Commission survey. The cost: $5 billion for individuals and nearly $48 billion for businesses. Credit card misuse was the most common violation, affecting two-thirds of all victims.