Featuring:
Chris Gardner, VP, Research Director and Chris Gilchrist, Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
Given the uncertainty in the market right now, technology leaders planning their 2023 budgets have their work cut out for them. Where should you increase spending, and where should you scale back? In this episode, VP, Research Director Chris Gardner and Principal Analyst Chris Gilchrist review the budgeting and planning recommendations in Forrester’s planning guides for technology executives and tech operations leaders.
The good news is that overall technology budgets are expected to increase or at least stay flat in 2023. But they’ll likely get more scrutiny, so ensuring that you make the most of that spend is vital in the year ahead. “This is not the time to hold back on tech spending,” says Gilchrist. “The expectations from the business are higher than ever.”
As technology leaders review their tech stacks, Gilchrist says the focus should be on defending or maintaining spend in areas that are generating customer value and reducing costs or consolidating tech in areas that are not. “What this really means is experimenting where IT outcomes can actually be felt the quickest by the business,” he says.
To put that guidance into perspective, Gardner provides some examples of where and how firms in specific industries should (and shouldn’t) focus their tech spending in 2023. The three technology areas that he says merit some experimentation are modernizing through cloud-native, edge analytics, and TuringBots, which are AI-enabled bots that can write code.
Later in the episode, the analysts point out which emerging technologies may have been “nice to have” in past budgeting cycles but are “must haves” for 2023 and beyond. To learn more about these areas, check out Forrester’s new guide, 2023 Planning Isn’t Business As Usual.
