Gartner has published its predictions for the year ahead. As topics that increase in their strategic importance in 2007, it identifies the following:

  • Application Platforms on the Verge of Change
  • SOA Advances
  • Application Strategy and Governance Emerge as Core IT Competencies
  • Process, Technology and Design Agility Will Drive Superior Supply Chain Performance
  • Pervasive Use of Business Intelligence Will Pressure Market
  • Internal Skills Are Inadequate for BPM Maturity
  • Align BPM and SOA Initiatives Now to Increase Chances of Becoming a Leader by 2010
  • Collaboration Rebels Innovate While Empires Consolidate
  • A Return to Growth Fuels Marketing Technology Spending
  • Poor Customer Service Will Undercut All IT Efforts
  • Emerging Trends Drive Disruptive Innovation
  • Big Changes Ahead in the High-Performance Workplace
  • Information Infrastructure Emerges
  • Information Infrastructure: Content Matters
  • CIOs and IT Leaders Enter the Decision-Making Discomfort Zone
  • Risk Management, Ethics, Governance and Compliance
  • Information Security — Secure Business Enablement
  • Brace Yourself for the Next Wave of Server Technology
  • Offshore Outsourcing Moves Beyond Labor Arbitrage
  • IT Outsourcing Starts to Break From Tradition
  • Web 2.0 and Consumerization Forge Into the Enterprise

Another good list of top trends is from CIO Insight magazine. The editors projected 30 major trends in four different categories: Strategy, Management, Security, and Technology as follows:

Strategy:

  1. Process improvement will be job No. 1
  2. IT works on closing the sale
  3. Companies make their Web sites more engaging
  4. Customer service gets a tune-up
  5. Companies put their mounds of data to work
  6. Information governance gains momentum
  7. CIOs strive to be strategic

Management:

  1. The division between IT and business will diminish
  2. CIO compensation keeps climbing
  3. IT organizations will keep growing
  4. CIOs struggle to find business-savvy technologists
  5. Outsourcing changes IT management
  6. Outsourcing growth slows
  7. Offshoring shifts from India
  8. Companies invest in IT leadership
  9. Demonstrating ROI will remain a struggle

Security and Risk:

  1. No abatement of IT security threats
  2. Security concerns turn users away from Windows
  3. Security morphs into risk management
  4. Compliance achieves what government intended
  5. Compliance spurs financial process improvement

Technology:

  1. The move to a new architecture marches on
  2. Enterprise applications start losing their luster
  3. Data quality demands attention
  4. IT reluctantly embraces Web 2.0
  5. IT innovation loses traction
  6. Business process management services and software will frustrate users
  7. For business intelligence, the best is yet to come
  8. IT organizations start going green
  9. Dissatisfaction with vendors is on the rise

The EDS Fellows have also identified eight technology trends for the year 2007:

  1. Maturing Mobility — The current devices and applications of mobility are reaching a plateau.
  2. Expanding Edge — The Edge (the farthest point of IT with application) will continue to extend modestly in terms of devices, but will expand rapidly in volume.
  3. Shift From Monolithic Applications to Granular Applications — Will begin with enterprise applications and expand as part of the shift to Service Oriented Architecture.
  4. Security and Privacy — More sophisticated and subtle attacks on security will continue, and prevention and remediation techniques will mimic the defense mechanisms of the human body.
  5. Infrastructure Goes Virtual — Smaller and mid-sized companies will begin to adopt the rudimentary idea of cloud computing, and large companies will continue to struggle to understand the how, what, when and why of utility computing.
  6. Decision Automation Improves — Simulation capabilities will move from engineering to business usage and will drive better decision making.
  7. Shift of IT Spend from Maintenance to Development — Application rationalization and modernization, through refactoring business rules, extracting business processes and applying them to advanced capabilities, will cause this shift.
  8. Personalized Services Will Increase Service Quality — Anonymized personal information will protect privacy.

As a distillation of these predictions, I would project the following top 5 trends for 2007 and beyond:

  1. Outside-in-driven customer-focused process-oriented strategic management.
  2. Governed enterprise architecture embracing BPM and SOA.
  3. Virtualization of IT infrastructure.
  4. Complete, unified security, common to applications and data, protecting business processes and Web services.
  5. Use of social software — blogs, wikis, virtual communities — becoming more common in a corporate setting.