According to Guest Editor Patrick DeBois, "Only by providing positive results to the business and management can IT reverse its bad reputation and become a reliable partner again. In order to do that, we need to break through blockers in our thought process, and devops invites us to challenge traditional organizational barriers. The days of top-down control are over -- devops is a grass-roots movement similar to other horizontal revolutions, such as Facebook. The role of management is changing: no longer just directive, it is taking a more supportive role, unleashing the power of the people on the floor to achieve awesome results."

In an effort to benchmark progress (or lack thereof) in the areas of open innovation (and crowdsourcing) beyond some early anecdotes and cases, we have brought back the team that first discussed this phenomenon back in a 2007 issue of CBR (Vol. 7, No. 12). While the topic of open innovation first burst onto the scene in the earlier part of the 2000s, it only began to gather momentum toward the end of the decade with the addition of the crowdsourcing concept. Given the staying power of the open innovation trend, we thought it would be useful to revisit this topic with a new survey for CBR.

We're in the midst of another tough economic year. That's clear across the board for anyone who doesn't have his or her head in the sand, or in the clouds. Pick your metaphor here, but in either case it's a reality that almost all IT professionals and business managers are battling a continued tough slog through rough fiscal terrain. This issue of Cutter Benchmark Review is thus an especially important one in its relevance to the very real challenges that we all face these days.