InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Respondents to our IT Spending Priorities Survey say they're playing catch-up.

IT departments stuck playing catch-up will never be able to ­innovate and become a true strategic partner to the business, but that's the situation many of our survey respondents find themselves in: 43% say their budgets are flat, 58% say improving security is on the to-do list and 40% say IT faces tougher spending oversight than other departments.

"Where does all of that data come from?" It might sound like a simple question, but the answer can have a huge impact on your business. You see, where the data comes from very much influences if and how you can use it to create actionable business intelligence. In this report, we'll look at sources of open data, barriers to access and organizations that are helping to make open data sets widely available.

Executive compensation is a contentious topic in IT, but as it turns out, having their opinions valued, helping set company strategy and doing challenging work are what really matter to executives.

Can you run that old ERP system on AWS? Yes, and it just may save you money.

Can you run that old ERP system on AWS or CloudStack? Yes, and it just may save you money. However, CIOs need to ensure that teams set expectations, use the right tools for the right use case and test before leaping. Oh, and don't get stopped by the application life cycle police.

Why is the difference between "standardized" and "proprietary" so important in today's data centers? We're in an age of commodity hardware, with shrinking margins for hardware vendors and a cloud environment where the hardware brand actually doesn't make much difference. These days, some hardware vendors actually want you to confuse the two terms.

IT's role is shifting to focus more on innovation and driving revenue. So why are budgeting practices so stuck in the past?

It can be a good time to be an enterprise architect, if you have the right mix of skills. While just 8% of survey respondents say the position will be one of their most significant staff increases, 74% say a shortage of workers has impacted their adoption of enterprise architecture technology.

Forty-seven percent of companies expect an increase in IT spending in 2013 and just 18% expect a cut. But budget tactics aren't changing to recognize shifts in IT's strategic role, with just 22% saying their IT governance board has a major influence on budgets.