Information-smart businesses will increase recognised IT spending per head by 60% before 2015, says Gartner.
This is one of the research company's predictions for IT organisations and users for 2011 and beyond.
Analysts said the predictions highlight the significant changes in the roles played by technology and IT organisations in business, the global economy, and the lives of individual users.
This year's predictions focus on the impact IT scrutiny will have on outcomes, operations, users and reporting, and highlight an increasingly visible linkage between technology decisions and outcomes, both economic and societal.
"With costs still under pressure, growth opportunities limited and the tolerance to bear risk low, IT faces increased levels of scrutiny from stakeholders both internal and external," says Darryl Plummer, managing vice-president at Gartner.
He adds that as organisations plan for the years ahead, the predictions focus on the impact this scrutiny will have on outcomes, operations, users and reporting.
IT crystal ball
The company says those IT-enabled organisations that successfully navigated the recent recession and return to growth will benefit from many internal and external dynamics.
“Consolidation, optimisation and cost transparency programmes have made decentralised IT investments more visible, increasing 'recognised' IT spending.”
It says this, combined with staff reduction and freezes, will reward the leading companies within each industry segment with an IT productivity windfall that culminates in at least a 60% increase in the metric for IT spending per organisation employee.
Other predictions are that by 2015, a G20 nation's critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage; by the same deadline tools and automation will eliminate 25% of labour hours associated with IT services; and 20% of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
Gartner also says four initiatives - context-aware computing, IT's direct involvement in enterprise innovation development efforts, pattern-based strategies, and harnessing the power of social networks - can potentially directly increase an organisation's revenue.
“Executive and board-level expectations for realising revenue from those and other IT initiatives will become so common that, in 2015, the amount of new revenue generated from IT initiatives will become the primary factor determining the incentive portion of new Global 2000 CIOs' annual compensation.”
By 2014, 90% of organisations will support corporate applications on personal devices, says the company.
“The trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already under way in many organisations and will become commonplace. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees - ie, individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices.”
Some 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets by 2013, predicts Gartner.
It also says that by 2015, 10% of user's online 'friends' will be non-human.
“Social media strategy involves several steps: establishing a presence, listening to the conversation, speaking (articulating a message), and, ultimately, interacting in a two-way, fully engaged manner.”
It says, thus far, many organisations have established a presence, and are mostly projecting messages through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates that are often only an incremental step up from RSS feeds.
“By 2015, efforts to systematise and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots - automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalised to each individual.”
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