CIOs Innovate to Work With a Tight Budget

As the current financial year draws to a close, the pressing matter on the minds of most IT decision makers is-how to meet their organizational objectives without increasing their IT budgets. Several CIOs jokingly advise that the IT managers can leverage their demands in a way that any reduction in IT budgets will hit the company's bottom line and hence blackmailing the management into giving out if not a lower, but the same budget as last year. But usually the management sees right through the ruse and the onus is now on the CIO to evolve and innovate. An IT manager's biggest worry is the capital expenditure he will make to upgrade essential technology that he has been postponing for a while. Some of them even advise to switch brands that might reduce costs. “You can move from a CISCO to a DLink. It will be cheaper and do the same job,” said one.

To help innovate we, at PCQuest, spoke to several CIOs to find out what sort of workarounds they used to make some wriggle room in their budget.