The importance of the impact of IT on organizations around the world, especially in light of the global economic crisis, has amplified the need to provide a better understanding of the specific geographic similarities and differences of important IT managerial and technical trends. The economic conundrum is especially harsh in Europe, and like in the U.S. it is having a profound impact on decisions pertaining to IT. Going beyond identifying these economic implications is the need to understand the considerations for leveraging the impact of transformational new technologies. By comparing Europe to the U.S., this paper presents the important information management and technology trends necessary to prepare IT leaders for the challenges that await them.

While the research initiative collected data from four geographic regions (U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America), this paper focuses on the analysis comparing Europe and the U.S. The same questionnaire, based on the lead authors respected and long-running Society for Information Management-IT Trends survey, was applied across geographies.

This paper presents the major findings based on survey responses from 375 organizations (275 U.S. and 100 European) in mid-2011. The top five IT management concerns within Europe were:

1. Business agility & speed to market
2. Business & IT alignment
3. Business productivity and cost reduction
4. IT reliability and efficiency
5. Business Process Management / reengineering
6. IT cost reduction

The five most influential technologies for Europe are Business Intelligence, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relation Management, Collaborative & Workflow tools, and Business Process Management Systems.

Keywords: IT, Management, concerns, issues, alignment, application, investments, organization.