Once the business demand for IT services starts growing in an economic recovery, it’s far too late for the in-house IT department to ramp up to meet that demand. The time to prepare for a recovery is just before the recession starts to bottom out, according to a recent report by Gartner Inc. analysts Ken McGee and Mark Raskino.

You can’t just wait until the recession is declared over. In the past, the National Bureau of Economic Research hasn’t made the official declaration until eight to 21 months after the recession actually ended.

Assuming there will be some modest economic uptick in 2010, the Gartner analysts say the ideal time for recovery planning is during the August-December period, when the 2010 budget is being planned and new IT projects could be incorporated into it.

The report says CIOs should work with business leaders to determine how any existing, stalled or new IT projects “will be prioritized, sequenced, funded and staffed when business growth returns.”

According to Gartner, CIOs should have a “return-to-business-growth plan” that is ready to be implemented quickly, when the time is right. “Having a completed plan will enable the near-immediate allocation of funding and staffing for IT projects, thus avoiding the need to take weeks to devise a plan after senior executives mandate the need to support business growth initiatives,” the report says.

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