Las Vegas, NV – Nov. 7, 2017 – Apptio, Inc. (NASDAQ:APTI), the business management system of record for hybrid IT, today introduced The State of the Global Technology Economy report during the 2017 Technology Business Management (TBM) Conference. The result of more than 25 years of data aggregation and analyses from Dr. Howard Rubin, the report outlines a surge in digital spending worldwide and finds that the technology economy, comprised of traditional information technology spending and supporting labor, has reached more than $6.3 trillion globally.
The scope of this spending led Dr. Rubin to further evaluate and understand how IT leaders were leveraging their own digital investment to drive growth and innovation for their organization. In doing so, researchers found that the top 10 percent of global companies by operating margin (“top performers”) share three core characteristics. These traits include:
- Top performers grow their technology spending 3x faster than the average
- These companies also earn 20 percent higher corporate operating margins
- And critically, 100 percent of top performing companies embrace the TBM methodology
The Scale of the Tech Economy
At $6.3 trillion, the technology economy now rivals the 2016 GDP of global superpowers, following behind the U.S. ($18.6 trillion) and China ($11.2 trillion), while beating out Japan ($4.9 trillion) and Germany ($3.2 trillion). What’s more, we found that the technology economy is growing at a rate of 2.4x the rate of the global economy.
Traditional survey-based methods of measuring technology spending fail to account for all labor for support of business applications, infrastructure and development. Software and hardware do not operate in a vacuum and require human support and coordination to run effectively. When this support is accounted for, the full scope of the role technology plays in our global economy comes into sharp focus.
“I have devoted my career to helping IT professionals harness the power of the digital economy to serve as true technology economists within their organizations,” said Dr. Howard Rubin, CEO of Rubin Worldwide. “The findings contained within this report finally help us uncover how some of the world’s leading organizations are achieving success and create a path for aspirational leaders to follow.”
TBM: How Top Performers Thrive
As technology spending outpaces the growth of the global economy, it’s essential to understand how digitization is impacting the modern business landscape. Responsibility for this $6.3 trillion rests in the hands of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and their team at organizations across the enterprise.
TBM is the standard method for managing hybrid IT, allowing technology leaders to measure and manage their comprehensive digital spending – including supporting labor. In particular, TBM was found to have a measureable impact on spending efficiency, infrastructure performance, customer and employee satisfaction and the reliability of cybersecurity systems According to the report, organizations that have implemented this discipline produce 69 percent more income per dollar spent on “run the business” expenses.
“The key to winning in this new technology economy is not simply investing in technology, but investing strategically,” said Apptio CEO, Sunny Gupta. “We’ve always known that the key to unlocking the power of the CIO and driving innovation in business was the ability to maximize digital spending with Apptio. It’s gratifying to see all of our hard work represented in Dr. Rubin’s data.”
Habits of Top Performers
In addition to profiling the traits that contribute to the success of many of today’s most successful organizations, today’s report also provides a series of ten recommendations for CIOs, IT finance professionals and infrastructure and operations professionals. These recommendations are aimed at providing these leaders with the key actions they can take to successfully implement TBM and use the growth in digital spending to drive business growth.
Report authors found that, on average, successful technology professionals where able to:
- Strive for business value
- Continuously improve
- Create transparency
- Shape business demand
- Deliver value for money
- Plan and govern
- Pay for performance
- Create a business-aligned portfolio
- Invest in innovation
- Enable enterprise agility
More Than a Decade in the Making
The State of the Global Technology Economy report is the culmination of decades of technology spending analysis at more than 3,000 global enterprise organizations by Dr. Howard Rubin. Subjective analysis paired with Apptio’s TBM best practices contributed to the results of this report.
The full report, introduced by Apptio CEO, Sunny Gupta at the TBM Conference 2017 is available for download here: https://www.apptio.com/techeconreport
For more information, please register for the webinar with Apptio and Rubin Worldwide, “Technology Economics: 10 Habits of Successful IT Leaders,” on November 30, 2017 at 9am PST.
