InformationWeek has released a listing of what it calls the Infoweek 500, a qualitative ranking of the most innovative IT users. A company has to have more than $500 million per year in revenue to be considered for the listing. The average size of these companies is $11 billion in annual revenue.

Like other research we look at occasionally on this blog, the data gives you a great idea of what other IT groups are doing. You can have a copy of all the related statistics. You have to give Infoweek some advertising-type data, naturally, but it is well worth the time filling out the "bingo card," no matter what size your IT shop.

Some of the interesting stats that jumped out at me: these shops are spending almost 3 percent of revenue on IT. The document breaks out how much is spent on personnel vs. technology vs. other, and how much is devoted to new projects vs. maintaining existing ones. Some of the data is split by industry which will give you an even better feel for what your peers -- or the leaders in your industry -- are doing.

The most important innovation goal for the group is business process management (BPM). Lowering costs -- both IT and overall business costs -- is the second most important goal. But that objective is ranked less important by the 100 largest companies on the list, as a group. Presumably they think they have already accomplished that objective.

The group as a whole is big into server virtualization but that is also ranked low by the top 100. Again, I assume they mean they have already crossed that bridge. There are 45 or so tables with similar great data, on such things as adoption of open source, wireless e-mail, Web 2.0 and more.