The bill, (which goes by the cutesy acronym CPU), was introduced in October by Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), whose district includes the Research Triangle hotbed of high-tech companies. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat whose Colorado district is home to clean energy, aerospace and medical device companies, is a co-sponsor, as are three Republicans: Sen. Michael Enzi of Wyoming, Sen. John Isakson of Georgia, and most recently, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, where high-tech is a mainstay of the state economy.

A litany of letters opposing the bill decry it as yet one more example of politicians putting corporate interests ahead of individual workers. Most are from people whose livelihoods will be directly affected.

But management, too, is shaking its head. CIOs I reached in my home state of Massachusetts who were willing to venture an opinion wondered about the intent of the bill — and possibly its unconsidered ramifications. John Lauderbach, CIO at Roche Bros. Supermarkets Inc., said he could see how curtailing overtime pay might even raise base pay, as a means of maintaining compensation levels for employed staff who earn a portion of their income from overtime.

Ed Bell, interim CIO for the commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Senate and House of Representatives, said he was disturbed by the “cookie cutter” approach the bill takes to compensation in an industry where the work and skills to do the jobs are anything but cut-and-dried.

“I’m under the belief that there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into account when defining whether a position is exempt or nonexempt: factors such as whether the work is in Wyoming or New York City; whether the position requires 35 or 70 hours per week; whether the position requires an MS from MIT (but [the applicant is] new to the market) or a high school diploma; or whether the position supports applications via an on-call schedule for endless hours per week or it’s just confined to the 9-5 time frame,” Bell said in an email.

In 2009, more than half of organizations surveyed suffered budget cuts. In 2011, however, 56% of IT budgets increased, a healthy percentage compared with 2010, when 34% of organizations saw their IT budgets go up, and to 2009, when 25% of organizations reported IT budget increases. These results are based on SIM interviews with CIOs at 275 organizations in late June.

“It’s probably the biggest jump I have ever seen, and puts us back at pre-recession levels,” said Jerry Luftman, distinguished professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, who conducts the research for SIM’s annual benchmark.

IT leaders expect the positive trend to continue into next year. Despite talk of a double-dip recession, 84% of the CIOs surveyed expect 2012 budgets to equal or exceed 2011 levels. In one area, IT budgets did decline in the 2011 CIO survey: The percentage of corporate revenue allocated to IT dropped from 3.8% in 2010 to 3.5% in 2011. Luftman has attributed the decrease to a rise in corporate revenue last year and to the historically high percentage of corporate revenue allocated to IT over the past three years — which, at nearly 4%, was well above the average 3.6% of the past six years.

On the hiring front, turnover remains quite low, at 7%, partly because retirement-age boomers can’t afford to retire and partly because there are fewer job openings for senior-level positions, Luftman said. CIOs tell him that when an experienced staff member does retire, they are using that senior-level salary to hire two “newbies,” who cost less and often come in with the newer skills and technology expertise CIOs need. On the bright side, however, overall spending on salaries is trending up:

• IT staff salaries increased at 66% of organizations in 2011 compared with 2010.
• 67% of organizations expect staff salaries will go up again in 2012.

BI a hard nut to crack

Given their plushier budgets, what are CIOs spending money on? Business intelligence (BI) outstripped cloud computing; ERP systems; mobile and wireless apps; and customer relationship management, or CRM, systems as the top technology investment by CIOs in 2011, according to the survey — and by a long shot.

“BI was a standout — it was 50% higher in the rankings than all the others, which were relatively close in ranking,” Luftman said.

But it appears the upstarts are poised to give BI a run for its money. Mobile and wireless apps took fourth place, up from ninth last year and 13th in 2009. Cloud computing occupies second place, up from fifth place a year ago and 17th place in 2009, the year it made its debut on the SIM survey. The wide disparities in the amount companies are investing in cloud, however, show how nebulous this new computing model remains, Luftman said:

• 20% spend more than 10% of their IT budgets on cloud.
• 21% spend between 1% and 10%.
• 43% are doing nothing with cloud.

In one respect, BI’s top standing in the SIM survey is no surprise. The technology has ranked first or second on the SIM list of the top five CIO investments since 2003, Luftman said. The reasons for the heavy investment in BI, however, keep changing, he added — a mark of just how hard it is to extract potentially valuable insight from the reams of data collected by businesses . “Initially, BI ranked high because of the complexity of getting your databases in order,” he said.

As organizations have mastered the technical challenges of their BI investments, they have recognized they don’t have the talent to support the technology, Luftman said. “You can’t throw a tool up and expect magic to come out.” The portfolio of required skills goes beyond understanding databases and the way the technology works (important as that is) to include statistical and in-depth business knowledge. People with that combination of skills are “few and far between,” he said. The large volume and the velocity of data generated by companies — Big Data — adds to the challenge. “It is one of the more complicated technologies that we have been engaged in in perhaps in 50 years,” Luftman said — and SearchCIO.com can attest to that in our coverage of Big Data.

CIOs still have serious worries. Of the Top 10 IT management concerns of 2011, the first four focus on using technology to help the business compete. IT and business alignment claimed the top spot in 2011, followed by business agility and speed to market. Reducing business expenses through business process management and re-engineering took the third spot; and increasing business productivity and cost reduction came in fourth. Rounding out the Top 10 management concerns, in order, are these:

5. IT strategic planning.
6. IT reliability and efficiency.
7. Enterprise architecture/infrastructure capability.
8. Security and privacy.
9. Revenue generating IT innovations.
10. IT cost reduction.

I ask because I just read the Dice Report for February, which shows that corporate HR and technology leaders are clearly out of sync when it comes to IT staff motivation.

When asked about the biggest blockade to motivating their IT staff, the No. 1 answer from HR was, “None, our technology team is motivated.”

Tech leaders polled in the same survey said salary freezes and smaller raises were the biggest impediments to IT staff motivation.

I’m not hearing much about pay raises yet from IT folks. In fact, our IT salary and career survey for 2009 showed that salaries decreased from 2008 to 2009, but 458 of the 952 IT executives and managers we surveyed do expect a pay raise of about 4.7% this year.

Where does this leave CIOs? If companies aren’t acknowledging pay raises as a key motivator, what else can they do to raise the mood in their IT departments?

Training and defining a career path for your IT staff come to mind. Your IT staff needs to keep pace with an ever-changing landscape; and the cost of training could be justified as not only a motivational tool, but ultimately as a revenue generator for the business.

In the same vein, our CIO columnist Niel Nickolaisen points to the importance of providing IT staff with meaningful work when salary increases are not an option.

So, if salary increases and possibly training are out of the budget for now, what are you doing to motivate your staff? Let me know at ctorode@techtarget.com