Network Admins Report Shrinking IT Budgets, Little Hope for IT Efficiency Tools

Survey finds that 62% of network administrators say IT budgets will flatten or diminish this year, less than half see a need for IT management tools.

Symantec today released results of a survey of 300 network administrators that canvassed their thoughts and feelings on an array of IT topics. The majority of network admins are adversely affected by the economic environment:

— 62% said their IT budgets would either remain stagnant or shrink in 2009

— 66% said their IT staff would stay the same or become smaller this year

— 42% are concerned about job security

— 39% are concerned about an overall reduced IT force

— 38% are concerned about a lack of updated equipment

— 44% said their IT department is making less investment in new technology

— 38% said there's a delay in upgrading hardware and IT management software in their organization

Surprisingly, given that the surveying company, Symantec, makes an array of IT management products, the respondents expressed pessimism about the effectiveness of IT management tools: 70% said centralized management of mixed client and server environments would either produce no noticeable change or prove unhelpful; 66% had no hope for power management capabilities; 65% felt that software delivery to ensure installation of newest versions of software would be useless; 58% had no use for remote diagnostic tools; 52% said the ability to automate common tasks would not help them.

At a related roundtable discussion today about managing IT in a difficult economy, Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, said these results reflect the absence of such tools at many companies and the existence of IT silos (for instance, between client management and server management) that are hard to break down. But another part of the problem is a need for education, he says. "People don't see the technology and aren't aware of what it can do."

Steve Morton, vice president, product management of the endpoint security and management group at Symantec, pointed out that across the board, three times as many respondents said these technologies would be helpful as said they would be unhelpful.

In my view, it's also possible that network administrators feel threatened by some of these technologies — after all, if a company is buying software to automate common tasks, handle software updates and perform remote diagnostics, it should be able to get away with having fewer network admins.

Matt Giblin, IT manager at Mercy Health Services (a Symantec customer) said that IT management tools have helped his hospital save money by "harvesting IT licenses" — referring (I believe) to the ability to reduce the number of software licenses a company is paying for simply by being able to see accurately who is using what, and therefore determining which licenses can be let go.

Tom Quillin, director of Digital Office Ecosystem Development at Intel, brought up an interesting NPR program about the origins of the "strategically vague" phrase "doing more with less," starting with Benjamin Franklin. You can listen to it here.