Trying to predict the economy is like a sword-nunchuck. The more you flail around with it, the more likely you are to lose your head.

Over the past few weeks we released the results of two surveys we conducted – one at Interop New York in mid-September, and one at IP ’08 Expo in London early in October. Both of our results showed that, despite (or because of?) the economy exploding like a common household appliance on Mythbusters, network management spending would still increase for most companies in 2009, and only a few companies would cut IT spending overall.

However, Network World recently came out with an article saying the opposite – that the downturn in the economy is freezing IT budgets. This is based on a tally from the CIO Executive Board polling 50 CIOs, and according to Network World:

The late September survey of some 50 CIOs by the association for IT executives showed that more than half of those polled have put nonessential projects on hold and about one-fourth have decided to freeze IT hiring. And 61% of those surveyed admitted they were re-evaluating their 2009 budgets.

How to explain the difference? I suppose it comes down to methodology. First, the CIO Executive Board polled only CIOs, while we interviewed professionals up and down the IT hierarchy. Additionally, there may have been a bit of selection bias; we polled network professionals who were attending Interop and IP ’08. Companies doing particularly better than average are more likely than the average to send professionals on an expensive business trip; and to possibly send more people. This could have biased our results towards optimistic projections.

As for CIO Executive Board’s methodology, the Network World article didn’t go into too much depth about it so I can’t analyze that. There might be a significant selection bias (for example, perhaps the financial industry – hardest hit – is overly represented in the CIO Executive Board’s survey.)

The good news is that in the past hour, the stock market rallied back, and maybe we’re starting to see the bottom of the slide. Or things could get bad again next Monday. You never know.

Please, let us know in our comments section how IT spending is being affected in your own organizations; I get the feeling that personal stories might provide some insight into what’s going on.