What is the point of the perennial IT survey process? For some, it is a way to assess IT market prospects for the year. For others, it is a contributor to their benchmarking process, as the results can indicate baseline behavior. For still others, it's a way to surface issues that might be lurking just over the horizon and to provide hints for tuning competitive strategies and tactics.

This issue of CBR is the first in what is intended to become a yearly installment on the topic of IT trends; an issue on another annual theme, budgets and the budgeting process, is scheduled to come out later this year. Our focus here is to evaluate the new technologies and IT trends you should be watching for in the upcoming year. Making this a yearly issue enables us to create a database of the technologies and trends our readers are looking at as well as those they are gaining or losing interest in.

This survey explored interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies in 132 organizations worldwide. Almost half of the respondents (47%) hold senior management/ policy making or IS/IT management titles, with project management, operations, engineering/R&D, and software engineering/programming being among the other job titles reported. Of responding organizations, 46% are headquartered in North America, 27% in Europe, 19% in Asia/Pacific, with the remainder in the Middle East and South America.

I recently reviewed Kevin Tate's Sustainable Software Development: An Agile Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 2006) for the Boston SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) newsletter In-the-SPIN. The book contains a roadmap to a software development organization that can produce high-quality, feature-rich software year after year without burning out the programmers or the managers. In my review, I generally praise Tate's emphasis on sustainability as key to success in software development.

IT strategy

Within the next five years, IT managers will be spending most of their mobile device budgets on mobile thin clients and will be minimizing or eliminating traditional laptop PCs for their mobile users.

IT strategy

Within the next five years, IT managers will be spending most of their mobile device budgets on mobile thin clients and will be minimizing or eliminating traditional laptop PCs for their mobile users.

In my last Executive Update (Vol. 8, No. 23), I wrote about specialty offices, one of which is the vendor management office (VMO).

In my last Executive Update (Vol. 8, No. 23), I wrote about specialty offices, one of which is the vendor management office (VMO).

Read the Executive Summary  

Consider the following alarming statistics reported in a 2 August 2004 article in Computer Weekly: