Organizations value results and partnership over price when they choose a vendor, according to a survey we commissioned from Technology Business Research (TBR). It’s a surprising and heartening finding given the pressure IT managers are under to trim budgets, but paradoxically, their results-driven mindset should help them achieve precisely that.
We commissioned the research to find out precisely how IT decision makers are helping their companies do more. How is their role changing? How are businesses making technology decisions? And how are they using technologies to impact business? The respondents, who are IT decision makers from mid-large companies, prefer to measure the success of the technologies based on delivering speedy business results and enabling new business opportunities as opposed to saving on staffing costs. In addition, the respondents value a number of other performance-driven measures over cost-cutting.
There’s more. Throughout the study, IT decision makers reflected the changes in their roles and the shifts in their thinking when it comes to choosing a technology provider. Fully two-thirds of respondents said that their IT departments play a critical, fundamental role in supporting their companies’ business objectives. More than 60 percent reported that achieving their organizations’ strategic mission was the most important factor in evaluating technology decisions.
Furthermore, the study found that organizations value having one end-to-end solutions provider, which allows organizations to capitalize on changing business conditions quickly. Over three-quarters of the respondents placed increasing degrees of importance on vendors who have understanding of end-user computing and the datacenter.
What I find heartening isn’t the fact that IT managers aren’t prioritizing budget – their pressures are shared by everyone. It’s their understanding that investing in technologies that can achieve their business goals and deliver greater effectiveness and speed is a better way to be efficient than pure cost-cutting. We all agree: there are not too many investments that truly can save you money, but technology is one of them.
The findings I mentioned are only a few found in the study. Read the rest here.
