For Mexican Business Leaders, Tech is a Bridge to Higher Performance

While awareness of technology’s contribution to running a successful business is growing around the world, executives in Mexico seem especially convinced of technology’s contribution to business success.  CompTIA (a U.S. based tech advocacy group) surveyed IT and business executives in nine countries and one region (Middle East) in order to collect and share data about global technology adoption and workforce trends.

According to the International Technology Adoption and Workforce Issues study, 72 percent of Mexican executives believe business conditions will improve in the next 12 months. That makes Mexico the third most optimistic country, trailing Brazil (85 percent) and India (81 percent).

Not surprisingly, given their still-slumping economies, the least positive forecasts came from France, where just 26 percent of execs think business conditions will improve, followed by Japan (34 percent), the UK (37 percent) and Germany (40 percent).

Tech’s Impact on Business

Eighty-nine percent of Mexican execs linked technology to business success. This made them among the most positive respondents about technology’s impact. The Middle East was the only area with higher scores in this category.

And 93 percent of Mexican executives intend to increase IT spending in the next 12 months. Again, this puts Mexico near the head of the pack, behind only Brazil and India — both with 97 percent of execs predicting increases.  Mexico also nearly topped the charts on projected spending increases. Respondents expect to grow IT budgets by 7.3 percent, trailing only India (7.6 percent).

Demonstrating softness in the economy, Japanese execs expect to increase IT spending just 1.8 percent in the next year. And the situation isn’t much better in Europe, where the UK (1.8 percent), France (2.3 percent) and Germany (4.3 percent) were more cautious on spending than their global peers.

These results mesh with Gartner’s findings, which we wrote about in March, that countries with immature IT markets will outspend their counterparts in more mature markets. For example, Gartner found that 69 percent of organizations in emerging regions expect bigger budgets for new software licenses in 2014, compared with 47 percent from mature regions who said their budgets would grow.

As the study notes, CompTIA’s prediction for IT spending is similar to forecasts by IDC, which is calling for 5.7 spending growth, Forrester Research (5.4 percent) and Gartner (4.1 percent).

Room for Tech Improvement

In the not-so-positive category, just 6 percent of Mexican executives say they are “exactly where we want to be” in utilizing technology. The only lower scores came from Japan (2 percent) and France (5 percent). Overall, 15 percent of respondents said they were “exactly” where they wanted to be, and 43 percent said they were “very close.”

Ninety percent of Mexican execs did say they were “close to where we want to be” or “moderately close to where we want to be” in terms of tech utilization.

Among the countries where execs expressed the most confidence in their use of technology: India (35 percent) and Thailand (33 percent).

The three top technology priorities for Mexican businesses in the coming months: leverage IT to improve business operations, reach new customers and improve staff productivity.

The article was first appeared on NSAM’s sister publication Global Delivery Report.