The business sector is continually watching consumer-spending statistics -- and for good reason. While measures of consumer confidence are on the rise in the US, indicating a positive change, this hasn't completely translated into an appropriate change in business spending. Economists appear to be waiting to see how much of the rise in consumer spending is related to the Cash for Clunkers program and to the massive injection of cash into the system over the last few months versus how much of it can be sustained. Meanwhile, though the home mortgage industry and related sectors get all the attention, the commercial real estate sector still has more bad news ahead of it. Corporate borrowing got out of control, too. Clearly, the consumer, both here and abroad, will have to lead the US to continued growth.

It is very challenging to negotiate when the other party is more powerful than you are. While differences in power do exist in negotiations, power is complex, with some factors acting for you and others against you. You need to be able to understand and exploit these dynamics. Even when you don't have much power, there are tools you can use to influence matters in your favor. Your success in a negotiation is therefore largely based on your ability to identify and use every point of power, skill, and influence to your advantage, so you can negotiate as effectively as possible under any set of circumstances.

For Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR), Cutter Consortium has conducted three annual worldwide surveys about IT budget practices, and, in 2008, conducted a worldwide survey about dynamic IT and the impact of IT governance on the ability of companies to be dynamic. The participants were global in scope (about half from North America with the remaining from other parts of the world). In 2008, Cutter Mexico conducted its own survey with Latin American participants using questions about both IT budget and IT governance. This Executive Update reviews those results. The purpose is to compare and contrast the Latin American results with our world results, making observations and recommendations along the way.

There are five things that everyone better do over the next 12-18 months: 1) rethink and (re-) develop your overall business technology strategies; 2) redesign and redeploy your computing and communications architectures; 3) rethink and re-implement your technology delivery strategies; 4) re-organize your technology organizations with special attention to business technology skills gaps; 5) identify and implement meaningful and measurable technology performance metrics. These five areas define the decisions that must be made as the business technology field fundamentally changes from the world we understood just five years ago. Is there some urgency here? Absolutely, because the nature of the changes we've been tracking is so profound that a misstep here could cost a great deal of time, effort and money.