After the long winter of recession, the economy finally seems to be growing again -- companies are shedding their cautious outlook and as a result, IT departments are investing in capital equipment and services. That's my sense as I head to the airport for yet another client meeting -- my fourth city in two weeks.

Before January passed, I wanted to use the opportunity to make a few comments on what might happen in the enterprise architecture arena in 2004. Let me start by making a broad general statement: 2004 is going to be a major year for enterprise architecture.

The ultra competitive nature of today's business environment is driving companies to optimize the processes that impact their financial and operational performance. As a result, many companies seek to apply performance-driven management techniques to streamline their day-to-day business operations and facilitate better decisions across the organization.

I was teaching a class on "How to be an agile project manager" last week. These classes are called certified ScrumMaster classes; attendees discuss how to implement Scrum, one of the agile processes, into their environment. Most of the time is spent discussing the unique difficulties that are expected in the attendees' organizations. The topic of greatest interest at this class was cross-functional teams.

When a company has 90%+ of any market, it is difficult to get it to pay attention, but Microsoft really needs to since it is killing us in ways it doesn't understand. Recently, I've been having conversations with a number of CIOs and with Microsoft's users. The CIOs are convinced they are doing a good job, but many of their users are unhappy.

Most non-IT people hate the IT department. With very few exceptions, IT is seen as a selfish and unresponsive organization that is decoupled from the operations of the business and is a significant obstacle to organizational success. At best, IT is seen as a necessary evil. This may seem harsh, but it is the truth!

Regardless of how comprehensive and airtight their contract is or how much due diligence is done upfront, customers and providers in an outsourcing relationship expect problems and issues to arise. Despite attempts to define all conditions and account for all eventualities, outsourcing relationships are open-ended arrangements subject to numerous external forces and catalysts for change.

In my previous Advisor (" Business Intelligence Trends in 2004," 6 January 2004), I commented on some of the more interesting business intelligence (BI) developments and trends I see taking place in 2004. I also asked for your comments and suggestions as to other important trends for the new year.