CFOs, hold the cutbacks!  In the words of Indiana Jones, “You are digging for gold in the wrong place!”

A new report from voke (www.vokeinc.com) published by industry analyst’s Theresa Lanowitz and Lisa Dronzek have turned the whole “IT cutbacks” discussion on its ear.  This week, voke announced the “Fortune 500 Spending Required for IT Cost Savings” research report.  In this report, voke has conducted a tremendous amount of research as to what the Fortune 500 must do to cut costs in terms of IT waste.

Theresa Lanowitz had some witty comments as part of the public announcement:

“If we learned anything over the past eight years, it’s that IT should be treated as a competitive business advantage and not as a cost center,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke, inc. “Slashing IT budgets in this environment perpetuates the mentality that there’s never enough time or money to do it right but always enough time and money to do it over.  While some cuts may be necessary in the short term, we’re advising our clients to be highly prescriptive and instead invest in application lifecycle innovations to deliver strategic business value.” 

The report is incredibly insightful, but the most interesting determination (and why this is important to our series) is that the report underscores that “requirements are the single most important building block of software, and when not managed properly, are the primary culprit for applications not meeting the expectations of the users or time-to-market demands.”

The research goes on to say that due to the mess of requirements in the modern world, “63% of projects are abandoned or do not meet the needs of the user, and therefore the cost of software waste is astounding”

The recommendation?

“SPEND on requirements definition solutions to SAVE on the tedious and error prone task of test creation.  Invest in application lifecycle solutions for the business analyst by buying requirements definition solutions (for the business analyst).”

Get the report here.

BTW:  Earlier this year, voke also published a report entitled “The Role of the Business Analyst”.  You can get that report here.