Now that the new year is under way, I thought it would be a good idea to look ahead to what we can expect to see in 2002 in the way of data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) trends.

This is the first DEA E-Mail Advisor of the new year. In the last Advisor, I tried to summarize the major events for 2001. In this issue, I want to take a crack at predicting the major events for 2002. Obviously, given the scope of this Advisor, I'm not going to try to predict political, economic, or business trends, in general, but will stick with a narrow range of technological and IT developments.

One aspect of business-IT alignment that often gets overlooked in the rush of day-to-day IT activities is IT's attitude about business needs. An attitude that puts business first -- a business focus -- is an important tool to promote improved business-IT alignment.

Twelve to eighteen months ago the job market was so tight that many employers were happy to hire candidates who barely met the minimum requirements of the job. At times, the minimum requirements were tossed just to get a warm body working! Unfortunately, certain key processes were also tossed, including reference checks.

One of the most interesting IT developments in 2001 was the growing use of patterns. At least a dozen books on patterns came out during the year, documenting patterns for new languages, for component models, for analysis and design issues, and for middleware systems development. One of the areas that I followed most closely was the extension of patterns to large-scale application design.

When a project is launched, some of the decisions to proceed are based upon facts, and some are based upon assumptions: do you know the difference?