Corporate Technology Investment Trends in the Wake of COVID-19

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Strategy  

The year is more than half over and the Main Street economy is beginning to open up again. But what impact has the last six months had on investments and advancements in information technology? How has COVID-19 cut into the budgets and spending plans of corporations?

For those organizations that have had to shut down, it is obvious that their investments in IT shut down as well. For those organizations that were able to function with people working from home, their investments in mobile and remote computing tended to rise. Companies with large digital footprints like Amazon, Google and Apple have seen improved topline sales and upward movement in their stock prices.

The good news is that for many companies, investments in technology that have slowed down or stopped have merely postponed those investments until business picks up again, hopefully by the fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of 2021. Where companies are continuing to invest in IT mobility, security, cloud computing and collaboration tools tend to be where the action is. This makes sense in light of the increase of people working from home.

IDC’s Worldwide ICT Spending Guide projects that European IT spending will decline 4.7% in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19. Globally, the expectation is that IT spending could decrease by 11.6%, fueled primarily by the slowdowns and lockdowns in the …

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