For those CIOs who are in the midst of negotiating their budgets, or who feel they are being squeezed by CEOs looking to cut IT costs, the data reported in Accenture's second global IT performance benchmark research may help them fight back.

"Many of the findings in our survey of nearly 300 global 2000 equivalent enterprises can be used by CIOs to state their case for the organization's continued investment in IT," said Bob Suh, Accenture's chief technology strategist and the executive who headed up the study. "CEOs need to get real about investing to catch-up, and CIOs can help them justify this decision."

According to Suh, the survey provides CIOs with the following "snappy comebacks" they may want to use in going to war for the future of their IT budgets:

• Our customers are last in any line extending out the IT door. Customer-facing systems were found, according to the Accenture research, to be among the lowest scoring and the poorest performing. In contrast, financial systems have scored the highest. Cutting budgets now would hurt the customer more than the CFO in IT support. While CIOs say they are spending approximately 28 percent of their application budgets on customer-facing applications, this is meeting less than half of the technical and business needs of their organizations. Those organizations defined as "high performers," who allocate the same proportion to customer-facing applications, have invested in new technologies and in integrating customer applications that have met 90 percent of their business needs.
• Cutting the fat from today's already lean IT budgets cannot be done easily. According to Suh, it is similar to dieting. The first 10 pounds are the easiest to lose while the last 10 are the hardest. Companies have been pulling all the levers since 2001: offshore, automation, metrics; reductions today would be about making tradeoffs on who gets refreshed and who doesn't. The 2007 study showed that the overall allocation of discretionary and non-discretionary spending has barely budged compared to 2005. The study also shows that as an organization embarks on new technology investments, it should expect spending more of its time in IT operations as their optimized IT environment has been disturbed. While this may look like a step back to IT execution leaders, high performers view this as a necessary step toward business innovation.
• Potential hires will laugh at our technology. A time warp presently exists between their use of technology at work and outside work. The study shows that for the first time, enterprise technology has fallen behind consumer technology. Organizations once led home technology such as voice mail and e-mail. Now, the best technologies are used at home first and the company is struggling to keep up.
• Consumers expect more and are savvier than ever before -- if we don't provide it someone else will and our customers will vote with their mouse clicks. Accenture data suggests that organizations are less than half way to where they think they could or should be in terms of leveraging online interactions with customers, employees, and suppliers.
• Those people responsible for maintaining our legacy system are headed toward retirement. Research shows that the oldest modules of front-office systems driving profitability are among the oldest in an organization's portfolio. They average over six years old (with some surviving code written in the 1970's) and have survived well past their expected lifespan. This would suggest that migration is near. While about half of the study's participants are conservatively or intentionally holding their course on enterprise application upgrades, the other half is looking at such alternatives as SOA-based applications -- home-grown or industry created -- as well as demand applications and business process outsourcing. Regarding their sales and marketing and customer services applications, 57 percent and 51 percent, respectively, of high performers say they will migrate to