Chinese CIO Budget Growth Outperforms UK And Ireland

Chinese CIO IT budgets are dwarfing those belonging to CIOs in the UK and Ireland, research firm Gartner has said.

CIOs in the UK and Ireland are expecting to increase IT budgets by 1.4 percent in 2015, whilst their Chinese counterparts are looking for an 8.5 percent increase.

The Chinese target is 1.1 percent above the global average, despite historical data that shows Chinese IT budgets are generally much lower than the global average.

Lower base

However Gartner said the hike has to take into consideration that it is coming from a much lower starting point.

So it’s not all bad news for UK CIOs? No. In fact, Gartner reckons that the UK and Ireland is seeing a “generally positive” outlook in IT spending growth.

“In addition to this increase in the IT budget, there is an increasing amount of investment in IT occurring across the enterprise, with more than 21 percent of IT investment taking place outside of the official IT budget,” Gartner said.

Gartner has been conducting a global CIO survey for more than 10 years, with the 2015 survey reaching 2,810 respondents in 84 countries, and representing nearly $400 billion (£262bn) in IT budgets and a combined $12 trillion (£7.9tn) in public sector budgets and private-sector revenue.

The report also found that CIOs in the US have an IT budget increase of 0.9 per cent for 2015. While the average growth in IT budgets is marginally smaller in the US than the rest of the world (0.9 percent vs. 1.1 percent), only one of eight CIOs in the US is facing a decreasing IT budget.

For next generation of disruptive “SMART” technologies — sensors, maker machines (3D print), augmented humans, robotics and thinking machines — the survey revealed that for every category, the percentage of US CIOs that says “not relevant right now” is larger than their global counterparts.

Internet of Things

However, when looking at the number of companies that either have already invested or are actively experimenting, US-based CIOs are — with the exception of the Internet of Things — ahead of their global peers as those who have picked up on these technologies and have moved to either experiment with them or deployed them to a larger degree than their global peers.

CIOs in the UK and Ireland also show a progressive attitude toward emerging SMART technologies. A significant minority of CIOs have moved beyond monitoring the trends to actively investing and deploying solutions. This is especially true for robotics (9 percent) and IoT (10 percent).

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