This master thesis aims to find out by literature review the interrelations between economic cycles and information technology (IT) stages and deployment. In furtherance of this aim, an explorative survey analysis of the opinions of IT managers in Finland about how the economic environment influences IT management and deployment was analyzed.
By identifying recent economic cycles and IT infrastructure cycles, some inter-relations was ob-served. The effects of economic cycle on IT and IT deployment in organizations is difficult to prove although there has been some obvious reductions in IT project expenditures and in some circumstances an abrupt postponement of ongoing IT projects during recessions.
The result of this study is based on the opinions of 249 IT managers. First, there was an evaluation in performance matrix on how organizational objectives including IT are affected by the economic situation. Some effects were noticed in this population, but they were not statistically significant differences. Therefore an explorative analysis of factors affecting different key phenomena of IT management and deployment were made. In the analysis, it was observed that IT manager’s opin-ions seems to be most homogenous in the following variables: 1) Trying to increase efficiency of IT by cutting down IT costs, 2) Postponing IT purchases and investments, 3) Requiring extremely short pay-back times from IT investments.The explanation for the homogeneity in financial items might be because of the pace of change and invention in the field of IT.
As a result of the rapid pace of change in IT, organizations need to always keep up with budgets and investments into IT to derive the full benefits from IT. To be able to stay ahead of economic cycle changes, IT managers in particular and managers in general should continually scan the business environment for signals of economic cycle changes and subsequently implement pro-grams and policies to effectively mitigate the effects of economic cycle changes on their busi-nesses
