♦ 2008/2009 IT Spending, Staffing & Technology Trends Report - Methodology & Participants

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Methodology & Participants

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Survey Methodology

The survey was conducted from January to April, 2008. We identified and selected participants for this study in two ways:

An outbound telephone solicitation to specific organizations in the U.S. and Canada that met our criteria for organization size and industry sector. Survey respondents were qualified in terms of job responsibilities to ensure the reliability of their knowledge of their organization’s IT spending and staffing metrics.
A series of email solicitations to individuals who have opted in to our list, inviting recipients to apply to participate in the survey. We then reviewed the applicants in terms of their industry sector, organizational size, and job position to ensure that they and their organizations were qualified to participate.

Qualified participants were offered two ways to respond to the survey: an online version and a fax version. Over 90% of the participants chose to respond online. For those who chose to respond by fax, we loaded their responses into the online survey tool, allowing preliminary review of all responses regardless of the form of initial response.

As the survey progressed, we monitored response volume by industry and organization size and adjusted our survey solicitation activities accordingly to ensure that the stratification of the survey sample was within acceptable bounds. This is an important step that allows meaningful comparisons to be done with previous years of this study.

At the end of the survey period, we reviewed all survey responses and conducted follow-up interviews with respondents in cases where answers were incomplete or seemingly inconsistent (e.g., a respondent indicates no mainframe computers installed in the hardware trends section but indicates a budget for mainframe computers in the IT operational budget section). We then corrected survey responses where necessary.

Finally, survey results were loaded into a statistical model to produce the analysis that appears in this study.

Survey Participants

There were 201 CIOs and senior IT management personnel in the United States and Canada who participated in the survey. The sample was stratified into three categories of organizational size:

Large organizations: companies with U.S. $1 billion or more in annual revenue
Medium organizations: companies with $350 million to $1 billion in annual revenue
Small organizations: companies with under $350 million in annual revenue (note: in order to maintain the validity of certain spending and staffing ratios, we did not allow organizations to participate unless they had at least $50 million in annual revenue)

In the case of governmental or public sector organizations, respondents were instructed to use the total operating budget for the organization in place of revenue.

As shown in Figure 1-15, large companies comprise 38% of the survey respondents, followed by mid-size organizations at 35%, and small organizations at 27%.

The percentage of respondents in each industry sector is shown in Figure 1-16.