After a relentless year spent supporting remote workers and surviving the Covid 19 pandemic, IT departments are now gearing up for another boom. According to Gartner worldwide IT spending will increase by 9% and reach $4.2 trillion driven by the need to accelerate companies’ digital transformation.
The reason for this 2nd wave of IT spending is because priorities are shifting and there are new goals for CIOs. While last year businesses were in survival mode forced to start the digital transformation process early to get remote workers set up and figure out how to maintain the normal business process in a completely remote world. The new year has been driven by bigger initiatives, business are adapting to change caused by the pandemic and are now changing the way they do business.
Working from home
Employees will now be looking at working from anywhere, which will require new behavioral applications to make sure staff is supported. This could also lead to another refresh cycle for devices. A 4yr old laptop for example used to be suitable to give to an employee while Covid19 was raging and disrupting. However, now that we’ve been through that there is a higher level of expectation for work from home equipment and companies are anticipating a large refresh on PCs, tablets etc.
Technology that transforms the value proposition
Companies can no longer differentiate on technology that anybody can buy so they will look for innovation in tools such as SaaS applications and services that allow them to build with non-code or low code tools to create business specific applications. IT teams will suddenly find themselves managing and supporting a large number of software applications. IT will need to lean on partners who can leverage application experts to find best in class solutions to replace older processes as business moves to automate more and more from taking credit cards over the phone to responding to customer texts and internal chat requests.
Companies are working to think outside the box and build technologies and services that can boost revenues in a post crisis reality. Business owners learned a lot from the pandemic and the way business is run and supported will change. Cloud is here to stay and digital transformation is only gaining steam in the post pandemic world.
