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re you ready for cloud computing? Before opening your wallet, take a good hard look at what your ICT infrastructure is really like.

After a decade in the doldrums, corporate IT spending is showing signs of waking up: companies worldwide are investing in mobility, cloud-based services and collaboration tools.

 According to new research by INSEAD, produced in collaboration with AT&T, these accelerating investments are led by the Asia-Pacific region, where companies are investing a much greater percentage of their total ICT budgets in new technologies than in Europe.

Some 225 technology leaders from companies doing business in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific were studied for the white paper, Building Competitiveness and Business Performance with ICT. The results showed mobility is expected to consume 24 percent of IT spending two years from now compared with 14 percent three years ago; collaboration tools are expected to increase from 16 percent three years ago to 20 percent by 2015 and cloud-based services will see the fastest growth: from 11-26 percent over the same period.

These new technologies are expected double corporate competitiveness ' from 35 percent to 72 percent. But it will take more than spending to make these predictions come true. Unless your existing digital platforms and organizations are ready, you could be throwing your money away.

'It's important to remember that it is possible to waste investments in technology,' says Theodoros Evgeniou, academic director of INSEAD eLab and co-author of the paper.

Companies that don't have standardized digital platfoms and processes could find themselves with a much lower chance of getting value out of their investments and at the same competitive level as companies that don't make any IT investments at all, he adds.

On the other hand 'companies that have more standardized digital platforms at the level of systems data and processes have more than twice the chance of getting value out of their investment in these technologies,' Evgeniou stresses.

Avoiding 'infrastructure spaghetti'

Firms should also remember that simply adopting the newest technologies and doing so quickly can increase the risk of causing 'infrastructure spaghetti' which can lead to project failure.

'You need to change the organization on many different levels, from the way people interact with each other to the way people work on a daily basis, the way people interact with customers, it's a big change,' says Evgeniou.

Neither is it only the responsibility of the IT department to implement. 'It's the responsibility of all senior management,' says Nils Fonstad, associate director of INSEAD eLab and co-author of the paper.

So how should firms avoid this trap?

Fonstad says companies' senior management teams should assess whether they've got what the report calls the right 'key business enablers' in place and even if they have, 'they should all work together to really strengthen them'¦ there's a lot of work in simply sustaining these key business enablers', he says.

These enablers include:
'¢ Achieving and sustaining a sufficient level of standardization and sharing of technology, business processes and   data components across the enterprise (creating a 'mature digitized platform')