The joy and the pain of buying IT

Study You, dear readers, continually tell us in surveys how hard it is to get the investment needed to help you do your jobs effectively. Regardless of the topic – core infrastructure, middleware, management tools, etc – it’s common to hear stories of execs not "getting it", while expecting IT to muddle through as more pressure is piled onto already stretched teams.

But it has been a while since we have run a survey specifically focused on the pain and practicality of IT-related procurement, so let’s put this right.

Our latest study includes questions like:

“How often do procurement or finance get involved, then skew decisions towards cost, regardless of value?”

There’s then the old chestnut:

“How often are you forced to buy from an incumbent supplier, regardless of whether it’s the right choice?”

Of course the level of pain or pleasure often depends on the environment you work in and how well business and IT people communicate and understand each other, so we touch on that too, including the problem of senior management often having inflated or unrealistic expectations.

On the bright side, we are also interested in whether alternative delivery and commercial models – leasing, managed services, cloud and so on – are potentially removing some of the traditional budget and funding barriers. For those with an interest, we then finish off with an optional drill down section on your experiences with cloud.

Anyway, this should be quite a thought-provoking exercise if you have any interest or involvement in how IT budgets are allocated and spent, and as importantly, whether that money is always used wisely.

Click here to start the survey.