B2B eCommerce Initiatives Winning Budget Dollars

Thinkronization Newsletter November 2012

When we look at the priorities IT has with various business units in a company, they vary but the long term goals are often the same.  Gartner conducted a survey of more than 2,300 CIOs worldwide to better understand their top priorities and challenges for 2013.  The common theme among executives was finding ways to use technology to not just operate business, but drive business.  Organizations are looking for new ways to improve customer experiences, drive revenue and reduce costs.

For CIO’s, priorities stem from increased costs, budget forecasting and increasingly obsolete systems and technology.  Thus the priorities become creating new innovation, optimizing ROI, and expanding the business impact and customer satisfaction.  All of these priorities are interrelated as driving customer satisfaction leads to increased revenue and ROI. Driving innovation is crucial to success in these goals which steers the focus from just cutting costs as it has been in the past.

When we look at individual departments, IT Managers share line of business (LOB) managers’ concern with new innovation, as 80% say increased efficiency and productivity are their top concern.  IT Managers are faced with resolving the challenges and concerns of many line of business areas, often resulting in a struggle to make all of the business units happy, with many having drastically different priorities and competition for company investment dollars. This is often where CFOs get involved in sequencing projects based on anticipated ROI.

In our experience, 2012 data integration and collaboration projects involving B2B ecommerce systems that support line of business initiatives are winning the competition for investment dollars in greater proportions than in years past.  This is due in large part to modernization efforts that upgrade point solutions for EDI, MFT and Commerce, to comprehensive integration suites that support all forms of integration and that serve the main company LOB and IT objectives as outlined above.

According to Computerworld's Forecast 2013 survey, there is a sense of cautious optimism as IT organizations move into the new budget year.  The percentage of companies who said they're seeing an increase in their IT budgets was: 43%, versus 36% last year. In addition, 64% reported that they plan to make a major IT purchase or upgrade in the next 12 months, up from 60% last year.

When we look at what IT budgets will be used for, companies seem to be moving away ERP and CRM systems, and toward information-driven projects, including customer-facing systems, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, and collaboration.

Gartner predicts 2013 technology spending to hit $3.7 trillion, an increase of 3.8% from 2012.  Analysts advise that 2013 goals should be focused on digitizing the interface between enterprise and customer, not automating back office tasks.  Predictions also anticipate 4.4 million IT jobs will be created to support big data by 2015; 1.9 million of those jobs will be in the US.  The projected growth of IT jobs is expected to lead to a 1 to 3 ratio of growth for non-IT jobs in the US.

With such a large number of jobs being created, this poses concerns for Talent Managers; there is no assurance that there will be enough employees to fill the projected positions.  Only one-third of these jobs are predicted to be filled due to lack of skilled applicants, one of the biggest tasks for Talent Mangers will be rethinking how to hire and train a workforce to meet the demand.  Talent managers must work with their CIO’s to budget and allocate dollars to developing skills to support the demands of big data.

So where does this information lead us?  CIO’s, LOB managers, IT Managers, and Talent Managers must work together to create priorities focused on clarifying the value proposition for projects and formalize resource allocation. Creating a cohesive message of business growth will help all departments prioritize staff and projects to improve customer experience leading to financial growth.

Remedi looks forward to assisting you in this regard.

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