The next two sections examine levels of government and industry funding for IT research, concentrating on the years 1987 to 1998. The first section provides a framework for evaluating trends by explaining the importance of diversity in research portfolios, a theme carried forward through the chapter. This chapter reviews trends in the nation's overall investment in IT research. Vendors of computing and communications products, systems integrators, and end users all have different perspectives on the IT challenges that need to be addressed, and these perspectives combine with those of government funders of research and the researchers themselves to influence the scale and scope of the research agenda. Equally important are the types of work supported and the types of organizations that fund or undertake the research. But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Similarly, increasing the size of the research workforce demands additional financial resources for salaries and technical infrastructure. Increases in funding for information technology (IT) research can enable industrial and university laboratories to hire more researchers, increase the number of graduate students trained in the nation's research universities, and allow the purchase of more IT hardware, software, and services to support those people. The resources needed for research include funding and human capital, which are interrelated. 2 Resources for Information Technology Research