This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the fifth effort in our yearly series on IT trends and technologies for the coming year. As you know if you have been following CBR, at the beginning of every year we ask our practicing and academic contributors to take stock of current trends. Based on our benchmarking survey of investment priorities, we ask them to explain the results and extrapolate some guidelines for our readers on how to tackle the new year in the IT shop.

This installment of CBR focuses on an often-neglected issue: reverse logistics. To help us better understand the potential of the reverse logistics process, and keeping with our standard process, we recruited both an academic and a practicing professional. Our academic on this issue is a returning contributor, Kathryn Brohman, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Business at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (Canada). Our practitioner on this issue is Eileen Brown, an Associate Partner in IBM Global Business Services. Eileen has a wealth of experience in supply chain and operations issues having spent more than two decades in this space.

Outsourcing can be an important asset in the firm's arsenal, but it is no panacea, and it must be proactively managed. This very realization is what motivated our interest in an issue entirely dedicated to the client-vendor relationship in the IT outsourcing context.