Strategic IT Spending in 2024 – Navigating Growth and Innovation
With a projected 6.8% surge in global IT investment in 2024, organizations are positioned at the brink of transformative growth. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending it expected to total $5 trillion in 2024. This represents a 6.8 percent increase over 2023. And while this is an increase, it’s down from the previous forecast of 8 percent.
Investment in generative AI, based on the hype in 2023, was expected to drive more growth but Gartner now states it won’t significantly change the growth of IT spend in the short-term.
“While GenAI will change everything, it won’t impact IT spending significantly, similar to IoT, blockchain and other big trends we have experienced,” John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said in a press release about the 2024 IT spending forecast. “2024 will be the year when organizations actually invest in planning for how to use GenAI, however, IT spending will be driven by more traditional forces, such as profitability, labor, and dragged down by a continued wave of change fatigue.”
Gartner anticipates that IT services will continue to see an increase in growth this year, and become the largest segment of IT spending. According to the forecast, spending on IT services will grow 8.7 percent in 2024 and reach $1.5 trillion worldwide. Most of those investments will support organizational efficiency and optimization projects – something Gartner says is crucial during a period of potential economic uncertainty.
“Adoption rates among consumers for devices and communications services plateaued over a decade ago. Consumer spending levels are primarily driven by price changes and replacement cycles, leaving room for only incremental growths, so being surpassed by software and services was inevitable,” Lovelock said in the press release. “Enterprises continue to find more uses for technology – IT has moved out of the back office, through the front office and is now revenue producing, until there is a plateau for how and where technology can be used in an enterprise, there cannot be a plateau in enterprise IT spending.”
And while spending is expected to grow, according to Gartner change fatigue has been an issue. For example, IT spending only grew 3.3 percent in 2023 – just a 0.3 percent increase over 2022 spending.
“Even with the expected regained momentum in 2024, the broader IT spending environment remains slightly constrained by change fatigue,” the press release states. “Change fatigue could manifest as change resistance — with CIOs hesitating to sign new contracts, commit to long-term initiatives or take on new technology partners. For the new initiatives that do get launched, CIOs require higher levels of risk mitigation and greater certainty of outcomes.”
Mitigating Risk with the Right IT Tools
Many times, change fatigue in IT is the result of poor change management and the implementation of the wrong tool for your business or organization. When you are looking to change to a new vendor for IT Service Management (ITSM) there are some best practices you can follow to ensure success:
Understand your pain points.
The first step when embarking on an ITSM tech refresh is to truly understand what’s holding you back.
Talk to your help desk, other IT employees and those that interact the most with your IT department. Get their input into the challenges they’re facing, and then come up with a plan that can help alleviate those challenges. You may find it beneficial to put together a checklist of key features and functionalities needed to address existing pain points within your organization. You can use this list to help you ID the ITSM vendors that best fit your needs before you even start the demo and evaluation process.
Do your research.
Look at reviews and talk to other state and local governments that use the tools you are considering. You can also use companies like Gartner or Info-Tech Research Group to help narrow down the search and find the right ITSM tool for your organization.
When researching ITSM vendors you’ll want to be sure they can provide the following features and functionalities out of the box:
- Incident and problem tracking – When you run a service desk you need to have fast routing and the ability to group tickets for both incidents and problems. Doing so will allow you to properly communicate and be transparent throughout your organization.
- Service portal and knowledge base – Did you know a support call can as much as $22 (according to HDI), while self-service is just $2 per incident? It’s a recommended best practice to build out a solid knowledge base and service portal so customers can resolve their issues instead of taking up your IT help desk’s valuable time with requests like “How do I change my password?”
- Workflow automation – Your teams should be focusing their efforts on your organization’s highest priorities. By setting up automation for mundane, manual or error-prone activities they can do just that.
- Asset management and discovery – Make sure you can identify and track assets, plan for changes and respond to issues with an understanding of CI configuration history, blackout and maintenance windows and impact maps.
- Change management – The majority (nearly 80 percent!) of issues reported to IT are the result of poor change and release management. Make sure your tool allows you to properly organize and manage plans, execution and communication for new functionality and maintain the continuity of existing services.
- Dashboards and reports – Great ITSM dashboards and reports give you the key metrics needed to make confident decisions, helping you to identify issues before they become problems, support key meetings, profile trends and communicate the value IT provides to your entire organization.
Find a true partner to help you optimize processes.
Because IT staff often feel pulled in many directions and time is at a premium, you want to find an ITSM vendor that will partner with you through implementation and beyond. Target an ITSM vendor that offers in-house services with a comprehensive onboarding process.
Are you interested in hearing from more companies that have recently refreshed their ITSM tools to provide a better experience? Check out: Companies Share Tips for Automating IT Service Management, Solving IT Challenges