Cutter Consortium has produced an important picture of trends affecting business in Latin America with this 2008 IT trends survey. Our primary interest in this short report lies in the management and planning practices employed by companies in Latin America, how well these practices relate to IT's delivery of value, and the role IT will play in the future in the competitive and financial performance of companies.

CIOs have a wide range of responsibilities -- on one hand, they must keep information systems running smoothly in order to support applications in an efficient and quality manner; and, on the other hand, they must align technology with the business so companies take full advantage of the technology.

Most of the respondents in Latin America were IT executives (72%), whereas only 29% represented the whole global survey, providing this survey a more administrative vision. However, 71% of the Latin American companies have IT budgets of up to US $5 million dollars, compared with 41% of the global companies. In addition, 39% of the global respondents were companies that have an income of more than $1 billion dollars, compared with 12% in Latin America.

There are many reasons why a company decides to outsource -- from the need to increase productivity and improve service quality to providing a faster response and focus on its core business -- making the transformation from a tech-focused IT organization to an area deeply involved in the business decision-making process and contributing to meeting the business objectives at the same time. Other reasons include labor tactics that consider the staff size, training, and the cost of human resources for organizations.

First, I want to start off by thanking all my friends, colleagues, and clients in Latin America. Over the past two years, I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with many great people and organizations, as well as to share my enthusiasm for architecture with like-minded people in an emerging market. This has been a wonderful experience, and I look forward to continuing to help the market mature and grow over the next few years.

First, I want to start off by thanking all my friends, colleagues, and clients in Latin America. Over the past two years, I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with many great people and organizations, as well as to share my enthusiasm for architecture with like-minded people in an emerging market. This has been a wonderful experience, and I look forward to continuing to help the market mature and grow over the next few years.

Virtualization is a key technology for upcoming years because it helps achieve two of the main goals of modern IT departments: agility and cost reduction. Judging by the amount of respondents who are already using it in production (32%), it looks like virtualization has "broken the chasm" in our region, which is pretty surprising considering that this technology is still quite young (see Graph 3).

¡Hola y Bienvenidos! Welcome Latin America (LA) to our Cutter Benchmark Review Addendum. Considering how "flat," close, and connected technology has transformed our world, we should not be surprised if similar trends will define IT shops and systems. But do LA companies have other worries? Bear in mind that each country is different. I would like to highlight some differences that have shown up in Southern South America (SSA), specifically in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay as a group, compared with the rest of LA.

There is a significant difference in the survey sample, since just 33% of the respondents worldwide express their company's interests vs. 60% in Latin America.

There's also a difference regarding their departments, since just 22% of Latin American respondents consider themselves a spokesperson of their department compared to 29% of the global survey.

Region representation is highly questionable: 70% Mexico, 30% Argentina; and not included in those numbers is an individual survey of Uruguay, Chile ... and another line regarding Mexico. This certainly does not exclude Brazil, where trends such as use of free software, outsourcing, and virtualization can be much more aggressive. Therefore, take the survey without representation pretensions. I recommend that Cutter accomplish a higher representation in other countries of the region for 2008.

This survey explored interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies in 149 organizations in Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Twenty-nine percent of respondents indicated that their organization is headquartered or based in South America, 66% in North America, and 5% in Europe. Eighty percent of respondents hold senior management/policymaking or IS/IT management titles, with project management, consulting, and operations being among the other job titles reported.

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for the enterprise. As content becomes digitized, managed, and accessible through portals, the advantages of bringing most if not all content under a single management scheme become more apparent.

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for the enterprise. As content becomes digitized, managed, and accessible through portals, the advantages of bringing most if not all content under a single management scheme become more apparent.

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for today's enterprise as it attempts to manage the vast flood of new digital content now arriving as a result of multimedia and Enterprise 2.0 developments and to provide the framework of controls that is necessary to meet increasing demands for efficiency, security, legal discovery, and compliance.

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for today's enterprise as it attempts to manage the vast flood of new digital content now arriving as a result of multimedia and Enterprise 2.0 developments and to provide the framework of controls that is necessary to meet increasing demands for efficiency, security, legal discovery, and compliance.

Retailers increasingly rely on sophisticated information technology to support the management of their supply chains. Retailers track the flow of material between their stores, distribution centers, and upstream suppliers. Ideally, they share detailed information across and within the firm pertaining to inventory, forecast sales, actual sales, and delivery schedules, among other key metrics. To incorporate this information into formats useful to users, retailers are turning to scorecards.

IBM has raised the possibility that the mainframe of the future might well be a cloud. This is likely to have considerable long-term implications for vendors and IT departments alike. On 11 November 2008, IBM announced its Blue Cloud program to offer a cluster-computing cloud infrastructure for sale in the spring of 2008, based on a mixture of open source and proprietary software and powered by a BladeCenter-based data center using x86 and Power processors.

IBM has raised the possibility that the mainframe of the future might well be a cloud. This is likely to have considerable long-term implications for vendors and IT departments alike. On 11 November 2008, IBM announced its Blue Cloud program to offer a cluster-computing cloud infrastructure for sale in the spring of 2008, based on a mixture of open source and proprietary software and powered by a BladeCenter-based data center using x86 and Power processors.

As agile project delivery methods have entered the mainstream, the burning managerial question has shifted from whether to adopt them to how. Switching to agile often brings swift and dramatic change, but ensuring that this transition is positive in nature requires an informed, pragmatic approach.

With the growing mainstream acceptance of agile project delivery methods, the primary concern of organizational leaders and managers has shifted from assessing whether to make the transition to agile project management (APM) to how to do it from incumbent approaches.

Some of the most exciting advances in software have come from surprising sources. The military and defense industries, for example, have benefited greatly from recent advances in graphics and animation, many of which originated in -- and here's the surprise -- video games (which in 2006 was a six-billion-dollar business).

Business continuity management (BCM) is no longer a luxury but an essential element of an organization's risk management program. For an organization to have any hope of survival, the BCM process must embrace risk, emergency, and recovery planning in order to manage a "crisis" or "disaster" event. Undertaking any business continuity activity should form part of a wider planning structure; it is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end.

Business continuity management (BCM) is no longer a luxury but an essential element of an organization's risk management program. For an organization to have any hope of survival, the BCM process must embrace risk, emergency, and recovery planning in order to manage a "crisis" or "disaster" event.

Business continuity management (BCM) is no longer a luxury but an essential element of an organization's risk management program. For an organization to have any hope of survival, the BCM process must embrace risk, emergency, and recovery planning in order to manage a "crisis" or "disaster" event.

The term "ombudsman" comes from an Old Swedish word meaning "representative." An ombudsman's role is typically to provide an objective and supervisory role for issues that involve human rights, as well as provide the processes and resources to assist in resolving problems.