Some IT shops are luckier than others, of course. Eric Beasley, senior network administrator at Baker Hill Corp., a developer of specialized software for financial services companies, says his Carmel, Ind., company has been insulated from the economic pain because his customers haven't been affected by the slump. IT will see a budget increase as high as 20 percent, and Beasley says he expects to add three employees to his current five-person IT staff, specifically to help maintain the hosted version of Baker Hill's CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Among the big projects Baker Hill will tackle: load testing and quality-assurance tools for its Web-hosted apps (total bill: roughly $150,000), e-mail archiving to reduce the burden on Exchange ($25,000) and unified messaging ($50,000). These are large undertakings for a company with 140 employees.
New applications are taking a back seat to shoring up infrastructure. More than anything, IT shops are trying to squeeze more juice out of the hardware and software they have. Asked to list their top priorities in the coming year, the top vote-getter (53 percent) was "extending the lifespan of deployed technology." Next came "adding capacity to the infrastructure" and "deploying new technology" (both 47 percent), followed by application integration (46 percent).
IT and business managers are demanding more accountability for the IT services they perform and outsource, and enterprises are demanding more formal SLAs (service-level agreements) across the board. The most dramatic SLA spikes over 2002 were for helpdesks (more than double last year's response rate, to 53 percent), internal Web sites (nearly double, to 33 percent) and external Web sites (up 14 percentage points, to 40 percent).
The increased interest in SLAs can be attributed not only to more scrutiny of IT overall but, in some cases, to a new focus on compliance. The National Credit Union Association, for example, now regularly audits member institutions for IT service levels and security. Armed with new SLAs, Joe Lio, IT director for the South Florida Educational Federal Credit Union in Miami, discovered that a network scanning vendor he was using wasn't performing scans as thoroughly as the contract required. The vendor was dropped.
Asked which service levels they measure, 70 percent of respondents said availability, 52 percent said throughput, 50 percent cited user response times and 43 percent said transaction response times.
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