Andrea Di MaioOver the last few days we had a good coverage of the research note (client access required) that David Furlonger and I wrote about the euro. The press in the UK (e.g. the Financial Times and Computer Weekly ), in Germany (e.g. Silicon.de and Computerwoche) and in France (Le Monde Informatique) picked on our press release.
However I did not find any mention in the weaker countries of the eurozone (i.e. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain* and Greece), where the effects of a euro breakdown would probably be most disastrous.
[*UPDATE: A colleague of mine flagged this article on the Spanish top financial newspaper Cinco Dias]
I keep reading reports that depict very gloomy scenarios for the times ahead.
Just yesterday Confindustria (the main Italian industry association) published a report (available only in Italian) that mention worst case scenarios – in the case of a euro meltdown – where the four top economies in the eurozone – including Germany – would suffer a 25 to 50 per cent drop in GDP, with six to nine million unemployed people each.
On the other hand there are worrying signs, like the run on banks that is already happening in Greece, that the crisis may be worsening.
With a crisis of this proportion and severity one would expect governments and enterprises to be acting fast to prepare to manage contingencies. While this is clearly happening in some large corporations, what we see does not seem to match the scale of the crisis and its potential consequences.
As a minor, and yet significant data point, the survey activity we are performing (by the way, please help us by filling the very short questionnaire) is showing that there is a mild sense of urgency (we have a faster return rate for surveys on much more innocuous topics). But what is more worrying is to look at the responses we got so far:
The pattern we see merging from the responses is
- there will be changes in the euro zone,
- these changes will have a significant impact on our enterprise, but
- it will have mostly a mild impact on IT and
- we have no plans in place yet.
We have too few responses for this being of any significance, however one could argue that the apparent lack of interest (slow rate of response) and the apparent state of denial for IT leaders makes a quite nefarious combination.
We will be publishing our four euro scenarios to help client with their own scenario planning, and more research from several Gartner analysts will follow. On January 19th we will also hold a complimentary webcast (Euro Crisis: Plan Now to Minimize Impact on IT and Business) : registrations are open.
*** UPDATED on December 17 ***
Category: Europe and IT IT management Tags: euro crisis
1 response so far ↓
1 Andrea Di Maio December 17, 2011 at 1:56 am
I just updated the post to insert a reference on a Spanish newspaper. My colleague who sent the link also told me “Most of my clients that I have been talking with in the last days did not look very interested despite the current situation. They believe that being out of the euro it is not a real possibility or they just don’t want to think about it“. I guess that this epitomizes very well the point I wanted to make: it looks like many are in a state of denial.
However, it one looks at the overall economic and financial outlook, irrespective of whether the euro survives, changes or stays pretty much as it is, there are reasons to contemplate significant shocks caused by the double-dip recession (or worse)