This year's trends survey takes on an added dimension pertaining to how firms have reacted— and are continuing to respond — to the recent financial crisis that shook the global economy."

— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

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. The benchmarking survey on which yearly issues are grounded — both the January one that you are currently reading on upcoming IT trends and the summer one on budgeting — are based on a core set of questions that we ask every year. With this core set as the basis, we give our contributors the freedom to introduce newly relevant or emerging issues. While this yearly survey tracks what our respondents believe are going to be the technologies and trends to watch in the year ahead, this year's trends survey takes on an added dimension pertaining to how firms have reacted — and are continuing to respond — to the recent financial crisis that shook the global economy. Last year, we started plotting some of the most significant responses to the core set of stable questions thus showing some interesting long-term trends. Those trends, however, were based on a growing economic landscape that seemed fairly stable. This year, we map responses from surveyed companies that are dealing with a significant economic shock. The results, particularly those pertaining to questions on employment and IT project priorities, are interesting. The yearly issues of CBR, as I have stated multiple times, are particularly important as they give us more than a spot evaluation of what is going on. They instead enable us to take a broader view and draw some conclusions about year-over-year and long-term trends.

As faithful readers know, the opening issue for the year is also the one in which I take the opportunity to thank the CBR team for its support and relentless efforts during the previous year. First, thanks to Cindy Swain, our managing editor and the person in charge of herding all the cats (cool or otherwise) involved in the production of the 12 monthly issues of CBR. Her leadership on the operational side of things and her dreaded "gentle remainders" to me and all the contributors are a necessary element of our success. Next, thanks to the production team, without whose effort there would be no CBR, with Linda Dias and Lori Goldstein leading the charge and Bob Sprague and Tara Meads assisting with some of the final details. And, of course, thanks to Cutter Consortium President and CEO Karen Coburn and VP Anne Mullaney who help us in identifying issues of interest to the readership while offering their general guidance and encouragement. I am very proud to be associated with CBR, and I hope you will continue to find our publication a stimulating and challenging element of your intelligence-gathering process.

This year's issue comes at an interesting juncture. Just as last year's survey was distributed just as it became clear that the financial storm was a serious one, to say the least, this year's survey went out to our respondents just when talk of recovery was picking up speed and both Europe and the US seemed to be coming out of the recession. Last year, we speculated that the effect of this recession on the IT shop would be different. Early evidence suggested that instead of IT being one of the first areas affected by cuts, it would actually benefit from relatively more resources (i.e., the cuts would be more limited). We felt there was a growing tendency to turn to IT to create savings in other areas. As you will see as you read this year's issue, the emergence from this recession also has some unique features for the IT shop.

With the departure of Jeroen van Tyn from our contributor team, we only have one returning member from last year's IT trends installment. That person is our academic contributor Dennis Adams, who has been with us since the inception of the yearly trends issue and therefore provides us with the needed continuity. Dennis is an Associate Professor in the Decision and Information Sciences Department at the University of Houston (USA). His counterpart on the practice side and our new member to the yearly IT trends survey team is Mike Sisco. Mike is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Risk Management & Governance and Business-IT Strategies practices. He is also founder of MDE Enterprises, Inc., an IT manager training company whose mission is to provide practical insight and tools to help IT managers of the world achieve more success.

Dennis applies his trademark style to his contribution by contextualizing some of the most telling results of the survey with a case. He then systematically evaluates the survey data, organizing results in the general areas of architectural governance, applications, ownership versus access, hiring decisions, innovation, and IT projects. He concludes his piece with some commentary and guidelines.

Mike brings renewed energy to this yearly issue on IT trends. He begins his work with some general considerations, but immediately falls in step with the team like an old pro and comments systematically on the results of the survey. Similar to Dennis he organizes his commentary around main categories, such as staffing, outsourcing, innovation, technology trends, architecture, open source, software as a service (SaaS), and new applications. He then addresses some noticeable trends not captured in the general categories and ends his piece with some guidelines.

I hope that you will find this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review both useful and timely as you seek to evaluate opportunities and priorities for the incoming year. On behalf of the entire crew at CBR, I send you our best wishes for a productive and rewarding 2010!