Mashups are one candidate gaining increasing attention. It is therefore a perfect time for us to produce an issue on this topic to provide you, our readers, with the conceptual framework, the vocabulary, and an overview of the issues surrounding this emerging approach to enterprise business and data integration.

This issue of CBR is on crafting better business cases. Our intent is to evaluate how the organizations in our base of respondents make business cases today; to benchmark the success (or lack thereof); and to provide tangible guidance on improving the quality of your arguments and the odds of receiving approval for the projects that you propose.

As we've done for the past couple of years, we are starting off the new year of CBR with another installment of our yearly series on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are emerging, and which ones seem to be losing steam. Our ability to do trending and year-over-year comparisons is strengthening with every survey and the cumulating of results. We have been very careful in keeping some of the questions consistent so that we can comment on changes over time. Our contributors offer some interesting food for thought and insight based on the data.