By Tim Flower, Director of Business Transformation, Nexthink

Business-Led Technology Investment Will Be Born

IT has spent decades focussed on provisioning new services, but up to now has lacked the ability to accurately assess adoption, consumption, and sentiment from its own business users. This has meant that IT has had no meaningful way to calculate the true impact, positive or negative, of these new services.

2020 will see CIOs start to look at technology investments in a completely different way.

What is starting to shift is the concept of funding technology based on the benefit (or disruption) it brings to those very business users it is deployed to, rather than the benefit to the IT shop. IT costs absolutely need to be controlled, but the concept of "self-funding" -  that is, of IT projects that need an equal savings within the technology budget - is slowly starting to change as businesses begin at last to measure the real impact of new technologies on users, and on their productivity.

Take for instance a large 150,000 audit and consulting firm in the US who recently made a business case based on the anticipated outcomes of improving the End-user Experience. In the end, the global CIOs agreed that the initiative deserved to be funded because it was good for business, not because it was good for IT. We expect this to become a significant new trend in both the next year and the next decade.

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About the Author

Tim is Nexthink's Global Director of Business Transformation, responsible for helping businesses large and small around the world understand the power of information when viewed through the lens of the end-user. He is an enterprise IT leader with more than 30 years of large enterprise experience and joined Nexthink after 20 years of desktop engineering leadership at The Hartford, where he was accountable for strategy and direction.