Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast

I participated in this morning’s Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast.  Gartner, the technology research giant, brought together some wonderful speakers who shared information that I feel is important to healthcare — especially at this moment in time.  The issues will have major revenue implications for vendors (perhaps leading to service changes) and could delay current and planned IT initiatives (EHR adoption, HIE, etc) of healthcare organizations.

I participated in this morning’s Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast.  Gartner, the technology research giant, brought together some wonderful speakers who shared information that I feel is important to healthcare — especially at this moment in time.  The issues will have major revenue implications for vendors (perhaps leading to service changes) and could delay current and planned IT initiatives (EHR adoption, HIE, etc) of healthcare organizations.

The floods in Thailand in October of 2011 severely impacted fabrication facilities and this has lead to a shortage of hard drives. It is predicted that it will take at least until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2012 for the industry to get back to meeting demand.  There is some uncertainty about this timeline.

This means:

• There will be storage and server component shortages.  Storage will not be cheap and providers will need to be efficient.
• Virtualization (the cloud) may be a more affordable option.
• We can expect longer lead times for delivery, backlogs and double ordering of products.
• We can expect an increase in costs over the short term (re-assess those budget projections you made last year)

One lesson that comes from this situation is to have multiple geographic locations for the manufacturing of components to help prevent business disasters like this one.  In this case all of our (the world’s) eggs (hard drives) are manufactured in one basket (Thailand).

PC and software spending is down due to the downturn in the economy.  But, there was one bit of good news that I pulled from the discussion on software.  Spending on software (tools) for collaboration is increasing.  Companies are investing in technologies that will help them stay competitive and this means tools that will help their employees collaborate will reduce the need to bring on additional people. 

Now, I’ve been seeing this in other industries and have started to see it trickle into healthcare.  With health reform upon us, I hope my friends in the hospital start thinking a little more out of the box and how they too can leverage collaborative tools (aka social media) to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace.