Worldwide enterprise IT spending is projected to total $US2.7 trillion in 2012, a 3.9 percent increase from 2011 spending of $US2.6 trillion, according to Gartner, Inc.

While enterprise IT spending growth is slowing (from the expected 5.9 percent increase in 2011), analysts said it’s important to note that despite the global economic challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT.

“What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what cloud computing is doing to in-house data centres. It is allowing people to optimise around where they have differentiated capabilities,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research.

“The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “IT is a primary driver of business growth. For example, this year 350 companies will each invest more than $US1 billion in IT. They are doing this because IT impacts their business performance.”

Mr. Sondergaard said two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a greater contribution to their industry in the next 10 years than any prior decades.

“For the IT leader to thrive in this environment, IT leaders must lead from the front and re-imagine IT,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships, fueled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and mobility.”

This new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces. They include: the cloud, social, mobility, and an explosion in information.

GGartner estimates that while $US74 billion was spent on public cloud services in 2010, that only represented 3 percent of enterprise spending. But, public cloud services will grow five times faster than overall IT enterprise spending (19 percent annually through 2015).

“What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what cloud computing is doing to in-house data centres. It is allowing people to optimise around where they have differentiated capabilities,” Sondergaard said.

The next stage of social computing is about mass-customer, mass-citisen, and mass-employee involvement with enterprise systems.

“With 1.2 billion people on social networks, 20 percent of the world’s population, social computing is in its next phase,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “IT leaders must immediately incorporate social software capabilities throughout their enterprise systems.”

The concept of one enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions is dead. Multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialised file systems tied together with data services and metadata, will become the “logical” enterprise data warehouse.

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

“Pursuing this strategically will create an unprecedented amount of information of enormous variety and complexity. This is leading to a change in data management strategies known as big data. This creates what we call a Pattern-Based Strategy architecture. An architecture that seeks signals, models them for their impact, and then adapt to the business process of the organisation.