While IT budgets might be tight, that doesn’t mean IT spending is at a standstill. In fact, it’s still growing nicely, and changes can, will, and are being made even with limited budget growth. Some trends are underway, and won’t be stopped any time soon.

For example, mobility has been growing lately, and is predicted to grow by 50 percent by 2013. Spending within IT on creating new mobile applications and adapting their current apps for mobile devices will become two percent of total IT expenses, and that’s not even touching he spending on mobile devices outside of IT’s control.

Similarly, the cloud is an unstoppable trend, with over half of all IT organizations planning on increasing their spending on it in the coming year. Software-as-a-Service will be the biggest cloud investment, but Infrastructure-as-a-Service has a nice demand too, so it’ll see some nice spending as well.

Following this trend, we’ll also be seeing more end-to-end services offered. Packaged services of everything needed for a certain business outcome are growing in demand, and while IT organizations are still testing the waters, it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be seeing more offered soon.

As for project portfolios, we’ll be seeing more investments on information management and collaboration, which have been the largest category in project budgets of late, accounting for 32 percent of IT budgets on average. This has overtaken process automation spending, and is likely to continue to grow in the coming years.

However, there will be changes within IT itself as well. Focus on service management and helping employees be more productive will be the main trend, while information architects and user experience designers will be in demand. Yet there will also be work done outside of IT, with outsourcing and changes in the IT infrastructure on the rise.

I wouldn’t describe the outlook for IT as “bleak” at all, even with the tightened spending. These are tough times, but IT will always have a purpose to serve, and there are changes ahead that it’ll have to keep up with.