How to Implement Smart Spending for IT Investment

IT spending is forecasted to increase by 5.1% globally in 2023, despite economic uncertainty and turmoil – and that’s a good thing. It means businesses are seeing the value of tech investment as a means to achieve resiliency, flexibility, and a competitive edge. But spending alone isn’t going to deliver this – without a good strategy behind it, tech is simply a product, not a solution. So, where should you be spending your budget? Can you spend less to get better results? Here are our tips to guide your tech budgeting process for the financial year ahead.

Where should IT spending be focussed?

According to a Gartner survey of over 2,000 CIOs, there are 3 key areas where tech spending is being strategically focussed – areas that our IT consultants and strategist agree on:

• Cybersecurity – You can’t invest in new assets without investing in the protection needed to keep them secure. With threats becoming more sophisticated and frequent as businesses digitise, cybersecurity solutions are a fundamental operational requirement for 2023. In 2023, 66% of surveyed CIOs plan to invest in cybersecurity as a result. We’ve built a helpful cybersecurity quiz to help you assess your risks more effectively. 

• Data analytics and business intelligence – There’s a flood of data out there about your customers, what they want, and how you can deliver the best product to them, but it’s meaningless unless you can analyse it properly and put it into action. That’s where tech investments like smart data analytics and business intelligence dashboard tools become essential – which is why 55% of CIOs are putting their money into these solutions in 2023. 

• Cloud solutions – Cloud adoption continues to soar and improve in 2023, with 50% of CIOs delegating their budget towards this technology. It’s a sensible project, offering the best levels of data protection, making businesses more sustainable and cost-effective, improving collaboration and supporting hybrid working, and it’s customisable for all industries too.

Cutting costs with tech investment

Investment is synonymous with spending, not saving – yet tech investment (done the right way) delivers significant ROI that not only increases profitability but also supports cost savings. We recommend that you follow this approach to lower your tech investment costs:

• Standardise and consolidate – Start by reviewing SaaS spending to identify areas of duplication and unused assets, then consolidate under a single provider. This is a buy-bulk-and-save approach that not only simplifies tech stacks but also cuts back on the surprisingly high costs of tech wastage that occur through duplication. This allows you to then reassign savings towards key tech investments like modernising other areas of the tech stack. In addition, working with a single SaaS provider streamlines communications, allows you to bargain for better service prices, and makes it easier to run all aspects of the business’s tech structure. 

• Automate – Stop making your people (your most expensive and most useful asset) run tasks that a tech solution can do faster, more accurately, and in the background. Routine tasks, especially in areas such as sales, accounting, customer service, human resources, cybersecurity, and manufacturing, take up a huge amount of time and money. Software can do it faster and better – and it doesn’t take away jobs, it improves them! Staff are more productive, more satisfied, and more innovative when they don’t have energy-draining admin to do – and you can redeploy them to tasks that need the human touch. 

• Get help – Not every business has the CTO and CIO teams to manage tech investment properly – but every business needs to do tech investment right if they want top results. That’s where having a one-stop tech partner is invaluable. Not only is it affordable to hand over your tech strategy to a partner who works to understand your business and run it with you, but it also gives you access to specialists who understand the business tech you need, when you need it. With everything from vCIO and tech consulting services to state-of-the-art solutions and support, the right SaaS partner is a must-have for the digital age.

Every industry can benefit from strategic tech investment, but there is a mountain of products, services, and providers out there to sift through. At Otto, we’ll help you put tech into action in 2023, helping design and lead your project, get stakeholder and employee support, and align best-case solutions with your goals.