This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the fourth 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 our contributors to explain the results and look ahead to extrapolate these to create some guidelines for our readers on how to tackle the new year in the IT shop.

The benchmarking surveys on which yearly issues are grounded -- both this one that you are currently reading on upcoming IT trends and the one published midyear 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. For the first time in our four-year run, you will see that now we have started plotting some of the most significant responses to the core set of stable questions, thus showing some interesting long-term trends.

These yearly issues of CBR are particularly important in my opinion as they give us more than a spot evaluation of what is going on. They instead enable us to take a more extended view and draw some conclusions about year-over-year and long-term trends. This long-term view is more and more valuable as we accumulate data over time. For some of the questions, we now have four data points dating back to 2006.

This yearly issue on trends and investment priorities is even more interesting given the global crisis and the recession that has hit far and wide affecting pretty much all of our global readership. The benchmarking survey went out to our respondents at a time when it was clear that the crisis was unavoidable, but its magnitude was still not very well appreciated. The results, I believe, capture our respondents' early reactions to the accumulating dark clouds on the horizon.

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 year past: Cutter Managing Editor Cindy Swain, who is the real driver of the CBR bus as her pushing and prodding is a vital element of our success; 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 in support; and of course Cutter President and CEO Karen Coburn and Cutter VP of Product Development and Marketing 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 a trying time, to say the least. Most of us are in the middle of the largest economic crisis of our professional lives, and the uncertainty at all levels is palpable. Anyone looking for a visual representation should just plot the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last five months. But, believe it or not, there may be some good news hidden in the turmoil for IT shops. I just returned from the International Conference on Information Systems held in Paris in December 2008, where I participated in the CIO Symposium -- an initiative not unlike CBR that seeks to bring together IT academics and executives. One of my academic colleagues on the panel indicated that the effect of this recession on the IT shop is different. Instead of IT being one of the first areas affected by cuts, early evidence suggests that IT is benefitting from relatively more resources (i.e., the cuts are more limited). That is, instead of saving money in IT, there is a growing tendency to turn to IT to create savings in other areas. I have asked the contributors on this issue to seek evidence to support or refute this claim in our data, and the results are encouraging.

Both of our contributors to this issue of CBR are returning from last year's IT trends installment.

Our academic contributor, with us since the inception of the yearly trends issue, is Dennis Adams. Dennis is an Associate Professor in the Decision and Information Sciences Department at the University of Houston (USA). His counterpart on the Cutter practice side is Jeroen van Tyn. Jeroen is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture practice and was the practicing expert voice in the last two IT trends issues.

Dennis begins his contribution by setting the stage for the survey, and never was a discussion of contextual elements as important as it is this year! He then offers possible explanations for why early evidence suggests that the impact of the recession on IT may be different this time. With this conceptual background in place, Dennis delves systematically into the survey data with particular emphasis on IT labor trends, innovation in the IT shop, and compliance. His concluding thoughts are interesting and practical.

As is customary for him, Jeroen dives right into the data in his contribution, and he does the most extensive year-over-year trending. He discusses IT staffing and outsourcing, Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), and enterprise architecture most extensively. He also comments on some emerging trends, such as Enterprise 2.0 and virtual worlds. I think you will find Jeroen's insight and no-nonsense writing style very useful and appealing. His conclusions also provide some ideas about how to best prioritize during the crisis.

I hope that you will find this issue of CBR both helpful and timely as you seek to evaluate opportunities and priorities for the incoming year. More than anything, I hope that you will find our results useful and that you are seeing your own IT shop becoming more and more the "go to" department in times of trouble. On behalf of the entire crew at CBR, I send you our best wishes for a productive and rewarding 2009!