Enterprise Spending Methodology

The first stage of the project called for VARBusiness, in partnership with Cranford, N.J.-based business intelligence and marketing research firm ARC Research, to design a questionnaire formatted for effective telephone interviewing. ARC Research then collected the market data. Suitable survey participants came from a listing of more than 10,000 enterprise-level IT end users. Sample was selected from the subscriber file of VARBusiness sister publication, InformationWeek.

ARC Research conducted the telephone interviews in a three-week period during February/March 2003. To qualify, an end-user participant's business function needed to be IT executive, IT management or line-of-business management. Survey participants were based on company size, number of employees and outsourcing requirements. IT management,comprised of CIOs, CTOs and others,made up a vast majority of the survey respondents (69 percent). Out of 3,500 contacts made, 350 qualified and completed the survey, yielding a margin of error of++/-5 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval.