By next year, the IT industry will have recovered fully from the global recession and will have regained the US$3,4 trillion value it had in its previous peak year, 2008, says Gartner global research head Peter Sondergaard.
He was speaking during a keynote address at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town, which kicked off on Monday.
Sondergaard says Africa has started to show signs of a tentative economic recovery and technology will have a pivotal role to play as economic activity picks up. In 2011, Africa’s economic growth will be 5,2% and IT will play a large role in that performance.
According to Sondergaard, the days of IT optimising internal processes are over and CEOs are looking to their technology specialists to start contributing to revenue growth.
“Chief technology officers will have to start engaging in revenue-generating initiatives and this will open up a vast array of new career opportunities for technology professionals,” he says.
To do this, Sondergaard says information specialists will need to take more risks. However, he says the funding for these new risks will have to come from existing budgets.
“CEOs are skittish about money since the recession and any future technology investments will have to come out of whatever cost savings technology brings,” he says. — Candice Jones, TechCentral
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