In February 2004, Sandy Pullinger spoke about software trends at the ‘pub@hub' event hosted by the Blue IQ Innovation Hub. nFold welcomes all new friends who attended the pub@hub event and were interested in subscribing to this newsletter.

One of the questions asked by a member of the pub@hub audience, was ‘Who really makes IT decisions?' For the curious, here is nFold's analysis. nFold asked two relevant questions in the bi-annual Software Survey released in July 2003, namely:

• Who makes software purchasing decisions? Business | IT | Both
• Describe your software selection & evaluation process.

A comparison of the responses to these two questions reveals the trend. Both responses agree that on the whole, business and IT make the decision together. nFold's view is that this is a healthy balance. IT without business risks buying technology for its own sake, rather than to meet a business need. On the other hand, business without IT, might not be aware of the benefits that the latest technology makes possible.

Interestingly, the responses disagree on the percentages of companies where just IT or just business made a decision. To nFold this indicates that while some of the IT managers interviewed believe that decisions are driven by the business, the reality in terms of how decisions are made, means that IT is the true decisionmaker.

Another fun fact, is that 5% of companies interviewed had no local autonomy in making IT decisions, because they were dictated to by IT standards decided in global head offices. I remember anecdotes from some of the companies interviewed about how inappropriate some of these decisions were for local conditions (e.g. the enormous overheads placed by a SAP implementation on a small satellite office whose turnover didn't justify the expense).