ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Where to spend scarce dollars on IT is a never ending challenge for business owners. Deciding which investments in infrastructure, hardware, or software will yield the most return is a black art, but according CIOs these 10 places are a good place to start.

According to the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) responding to the Robert Half Technology survey, information security, identified as a priority by 43% of CIOs, is easily the leading category for technology investment in the next 12 months. More than 1,400 CIOs responded to the survey from companies with 100 or more employees across the U.S. Though CIOs could identify more than one IT investment priority, some obvious trends resulted (with security at the top of the heap).

In a statement about the survey results, Robert Half Technology. executive director Dave Willmer said, "Although times are lean, many companies are finding that they can't afford to postpone IT investments that lead to increased security, efficiencies or revenues. Organizations also are trying to make sure they are prepared for growth when conditions improve, and enhancing their IT infrastructure is part of that process."

Here are the top 10 tech investment areas identified by CIOs in the survey findings:

1. Information security (Identified by 43% of CIOs)


2. Virtualization (28%)


3. Data center efficiency (27%)


4. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (26%):


5. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (26%)


6. Green IT (20%)


7. Business intelligence (19%)


8. Social networking (18%)


9. Web 2.0 (17%)


10. Outsourcing (16%)

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