MY MARKETING HERO is John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach for UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Why Wooden? Because he led his teams with this simple premise: If we execute our game plan it doesn’t make any difference what the competition does. Scouting the competition was a no-no in his playbook.I was recently thinking of Wooden when I read comments from an analyst in The Financial Times claiming the current slowdown in IT spending was primarily due to large corporations retreating from IT investments. It seems large companies no longer fear disintermediation at the hands of smaller, nimbler, dotcom competitors.That may be true.But while companies cut IT expenses and staff to manage the expectations of Wall Street, customer expectations of goods and services that can be delivered via IT continue unabated. The smart companies that have continued to aggressively make technology investments will prosper in the coming upside. And that upside might be just around the corner.The CIO Technology Growth Index, our monthly barometer of planned tech expenditures by the nation’s largest companies, points to a bottoming out of the economy right around the time you read this issue of CIO. And there are other indicators that the rebound is happening, real-time, right now. CRN, a newspaper for value-added resellers, recently reported small companies are beginning to spend again. According to CRN, small companies are the first to cut spending when a downturn begins, and they are the first to increase spending on the upside.What information technology investments have you made since last November? Have you continued to move forward? Or has your budget been suspended? At the recent CIO Perspectives conference, we asked CIOs how they viewed the soft economy; 65 percent said “it was an opportunity to forge ahead and capture market share.”OK, there may have been a bit of tech bravado represented in the answer. But if your company is managing its technology investments by listening to the concerns of Wall Street rather than Main Street, you may be in for a shock when the recovery begins.Are you ready for the recovery? Drop me a note. Related content BrandPost The future of trust—no more playing catch up Broadcom: 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT By Eric Chien, Director of Security Response, Symantec Enterprise Division, Broadcom Mar 31, 2023 5 mins Security BrandPost TCS gives Blackhawk Network an edge with Microsoft Cloud In this case study, Blackhawk Network’s Cara Renfroe joins Tata Consultancy Services’ Rakesh Kumar and Microsoft’s Nilendu Pattanaik to explain how TCS transformed the gift card company’s customer engagement and global operati By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 1 min Financial Services Industry Cloud Computing IT Leadership BrandPost How TCS pioneered the ‘borderless workspace’ with Microsoft 365 Microsoft’s modern workplace solution proved a perfect fit for improving productivity and collaboration, while maintaining security of systems and data. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 1 min Financial Services Industry Microsoft Cloud Computing BrandPost Supply chain decarbonization: The missing link to net zero By improving the quality of global supply chain data, enterprises can better measure their true carbon footprint and make progress toward a net-zero business ecosystem. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 2 mins Retail Industry Supply Chain Green IT Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe