In its latest forecast, Gartner has predicted worldwide IT spending will total $5 trillion in 2024. It also reported that 2023 IT spending only increased 0.3% compared to 2022.
Gartner says one of the reasons behind the recent slowdown in spending is the fact that CIOs are suffering from ‘change fatigue’. This is often caused by IT projects failing to achieve the expected ROI, according to Vivek Behl, Digital Transformation Officer at digital adoption expert, WalkMe. Behl says this businesses need to place more of a focus on ensuring employees are able to adopt new technologies once they have been implemented.
He says: “As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Investing in IT projects that consistently fail to meet their expected ROI is one likely cause of the “change fatigue” that many CIOs are experiencing. Gartner shows CIOs need greater certainty of outcomes from IT projects – which tallies with our own research showing 35% of digital transformation investment is wasted on projects that failed to meet their goals because end users didn’t, or couldn’t, use the technology.
“Mitigating risk and ensuring the desired outcome needs to have end users in mind. To get a tighter grip and increase the certainty of success, CIOs have to accept that helping employees adopt new technologies is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Without ensuring ‘digital adoption’, the puzzle will remain unfinished and the endless cycle of unsatisfactory outcomes from IT investments will continue.”
