Senior executives back investment but demand payoff in additional flexibility.
A poll by consultant Accenture revealed that 72 percent of business and IT executives feel technology is more important now than it was before the crisis and that it will play a significant role in their company’s efforts to recover from the recession. And what could turn out to be even better news for tech-hungry parts of their organizations: support for IT spending is bigger among non-IT executives, according to Accenture.
This is certainly good news for corporate treasurers, who have for years slogged a veritable Long March toward lean and mean operations. For the most part they have been able to offset the whittling away of FTEs with new technology that helps them with their day-to-day functions.
Technology in the treasury space has made great strides over the past several years and will likely improve exponentially in the near future. And with the continued tightening of the regulatory screws along with the concomitant accountability expected of senior executives (up to and including being criminally responsible for inaccurate data and accounting that leads to dodgy earnings reports, etc.), treasury will continue to feel pressed to contribute.
However executives will want to see results, particularly in how new technology spending translates into better performance and nimble. According to the survey, 81 percent of respondents globally said they were under increased pressure to “deliver projects that incorporate more flexibility than was previously required.” That pressure seems to be most intense in the US, where 87 percent of respondents said they were under pressure to deliver more flexibility.
Accenture’s results are in accord with other recent polls (see “Technology: 2010 Could Be the Year for New Investment”) , and is based on an EIU survey of 557 senior executives from a range of industries in August and September 2009, and conducted in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. The survey sample was senior management, with 55 percent of respondents being C-level executives such as CIOs, CFOs and CEOs. Two-thirds of the respondents belong to an IT function, with the remainder executing other functional roles.