CFOs to bulk up IT expansion By Rachel Konrad
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 3, 2001, 11:15 a.m. PT
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5812383.html?tag=prntfr
Slowdown? What slowdown?
The majority of chief financial officers plan to increase the amount of
money they spend on information technology in the next year and a half,
according to a new study from senior financial executive portal CFO.com.
Almost six out of 10 CFOs said they would boost IT expenditures in the next
19 months, CFO.com reported, and nearly five in 10 said their companies
would resume a "more expansive spending phase" by the end of this year.
CFO.com crunched the numbers after surveying 98 executives during the CFO
Rising Conference & Exhibition in Atlanta last month. Participants included
finance gurus at GE Capital, Verizon Communications, Eastman Chemical,
Equifax, HotJobs.com and Mellon Bank.
The survey made CFO.com President Justin Smith confident that the downturn
in IT spending--and the broader malaise that has sapped the technology
sector--will be short-lived.
"The fact that participants in our survey represent a range of company sizes
and industries indicates that this optimism is not limited to a particular
sector," Smith said. "I can't imagine more relevant opinions on the state of
the economy and business than those of financial professionals working on
the front line."
Of those who anticipate an upturn in spending, 14 percent said they expected
a significant increase of at least 25 percent, while 44 percent expected a
moderate increase of 10 percent to 25 percent.
But the survey results were not entirely rosy. Nearly seven out of 10 CFOs
said they were "concerned about their company's ability to access capital
with reasonable terms" in the next year, according to CFO.com.
Researchers also asked CFOs to examine their role in the stock market
collapse and the technology sector's yearlong downturn. Two out of five CFOs
said "unrealistic revenue/profit expectations" was the worst mistake they
made in the past year, while 34 percent blamed unrealistic expectations for
the potential of the Internet.
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