Where CIOs are spending their budgets, and how to reach them

Forrester, Gartner, and IDC are hard at work in predicting the future. Fortune telling is always a tricky business, but helps when you're actually talking to the people that will be creating that future (namely, the buyers).

Forrester kicks it off by projecting where IT dollars will go (a $1.5 trillion market in 2007):



What are the priorities driving this spending? Gartner (December 2006) highlights these top CIO priorities:

• Create an IT Generation Succession Plan
  
• Start Tracking and Improving the Environmental Performance of IT
  
• Identify, Enable and "Incentivize" the True Innovators
  
• Reestablish Visibility of Total Enterprise Spending on Technology
  
• Help HR Become Strategic
  
• Improve Front-Line Business Experience
  
• Stop Returning the Savings —Report IT Yield Instead
  
• Stop Treating IT Governance as Procedure
  
• Stop Obsessing About the Minutiae of Technology
  
• Get "Hands On" With Some of These Technologies

IDC follows this up with an analysis of where tech marketers are spending their money to reach CIOs:



Open source companies spend differently to reach this audience, but they definitely still need to spend marketing dollars. Open source does not obviate the need for sales and marketing. It just changes how (and when) you spend those dollars.

And now for something completely different...

Think people can't live without your project? I (actually, Forrester) have news for you: they can, and they do. In fact, they spend most of their lives happily living without your technology. Forrester asked consumers what technology they couldn't live without....



Maybe we need an open source TV....