One of the big unknowns we have in 2009 is the fate of green IT budget. Is it there as part of the budget? If yes, then is it going to survive the worst recession since World War II?. We don’t know all this. We are in cut-to-the-bone phase now. I won’t be surprised if companies go beyond that and start envisioning severe amputation. Strategy gurus from Mckinsey spend lot of time doing crystal ball gazing. They have solid advice for CIOs. It’s all about managing cost and efficient IT driven finance. Data center is a huge cost sink. There will be renewed focus on measuring cost and there will be new spreadsheet jockeys analyzing models to wring out savings.

The year 2009 will be a tipping point for the CFO’s involvement with IT. Large businesses have hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars locked up in their IT organizations including data center facilities, systems assets, and organizational capabilities built over time. In a world where capital is at a premium, CFOs will seek to use IT assets as a lever to generate cash.

There will be different kind of outsourcing deals, requiring financial savviness in deal structuring.

They may sign outsourcing deals that include a bigger financing aspect, such as having IT service providers make a large up-front payment in return for higher margins over the course of a contract. They may sell and lease back hard assets, such as data center facilities. They may place favorable vendor financing at the core of hardware and software purchasing decisions, as many companies in heavy industry do when they buy industrial equipment and as telcos have done for years.

Also CIOs will be asked to give their views on containing cost using idle or existing IT capacity:

Successful CIOs will give the senior-management team practical ideas on how to optimize cash.

As cloud computing and SaaS deployment gains momentum, trend towards data center cost rationalization will be interesting to observe. There are other important comments made by Stefan Spang in the report. Government regulations will play a crucial role. Though not all for the negative reasons. Barack Obama’s commitment to green building and energy efficiency targets will help sector specific CIOs to review their budget allocation. Vendor consolidation is going to be a clear trend this year. CIOs will be busy chasing key personnel from outsourcing partners and making sure business continuity processes are in place. Any vendor flameout and hostile M&A should not affect core business technology processes. CIOs will be very busy this year. If you are pitching to them, use numbers. Pitch using numbers to tie IT goals with bottom-line and top-line will get audience. 15 minutes of pitch time ie.