New Normal – IT Investment Optimism?

Is the New Normal beginning to emerge yet? As we have now been living with the devastating effects of the Coronavirus pandemic for six months, is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

In an interview with Chris Wallace back in September Bill Gates said, “’If a vaccine approval comes by early next year as I expect, then by next summer the U.S. will be starting to go back to normal and by the end of the year our activities can be fairly normal.”

He has elaborated saying that for the Western world we can expect the impact of the virus to be over by the end of 2021 and by 2022 in the developing world.

So what is happening in the interim? Earlier this year we shared some of our thoughts about the key questions you might want to be thinking about. Now we have some more recent data to share with you for a fresh perspective.

We have started to compile the results from the recent Iasa/Enterprise Blueprints Global IT Architecture Survey where we gathered the views of IT Architects from around the globe.

There are two questions that are of particular interest when it comes to the pandemic.

First of all, we asked how businesses had been impacted by the pandemic and associated lockdowns.

What is perhaps surprising is that 45% of businesses said that the pandemic had been positive and overall 12% said that the pandemic had a very positive impact on their businesses.

Of course, the flip side is that 55% have found the pandemic to have a negative or very negative impact.

There seemed to be no correlation between the potential positive or negative impact and the size of the business.

On a much more optimistic note, we also asked about plans for the year ahead and a whopping 82% said that they expected their IT programmes to be at the same level or increasing. In fact, 57% said that they expected that IT programmes would be increasing.

So, whilst the impact of the pandemic has stopped many businesses in their tracks, there is a clearly an optimism for the future as organisations are staying on track in spite of the negative impact of the pandemic, and the majority are seeing their investment in IT programmes increasing.

This fits with our experience as we are seeing increased investment in programmes especially those driving out value through optimising the legacy estate at one end, and acceleration of the digital transformation at the other.

We would love to hear from you about how the pandemic has impacted your business? What is the New Normal for you? Have you been positively or negatively impacted by the pandemic? Are you seeing investment in digital transformation increasing? What are the key drivers of change in your business?

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