As we've done for the past couple of years, we are starting off the new year of CBR with another installment of our yearly series on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are emerging, and which ones seem to be losing steam. Our ability to do trending and year-over-year comparisons is strengthening with every survey and the cumulating of results. We have been very careful in keeping some of the questions consistent so that we can comment on changes over time. Our contributors offer some interesting food for thought and insight based on the data.

This issue of CBR continues our series on innovation and the role of IT in enabling it.

Is IT innovation important for your organization? If so, the time has come to find a way to create enough slack resources in your IT shop to buy time and brain-cycles for your employees to have the best chance to succeed at it. Sure enough, IT innovation is again a hot topic in corporate boardrooms and IT shops, and we are working hard to do our part to help you navigate it. While this issue of CBR focuses on dynamic IT capabilities, our next issue will be on the emerging topic of open innovation. In short, open innovation is the orchestration of knowledge inflows and outflows designed to speed up and improve a firm's innovation cycle (but, be patient for now, a lot more next issue.)

This month's CBR is particularly important because what we have on our hands may be shaping up as a big crisis that, to be successfully addressed, requires joint efforts from different communities that seldom interact. I am not going to use cheesy terms such as "a perfect storm," but what we can see is, on the one hand, dropping enrollments in computer science degrees and increasingly limited number of mainframe skills being developed in universities; while on the other hand, mainframes continue to run many of the large mission-critical software applications of modern organizations. On the "third hand" (or the underhand as the famous blues song goes) is the lack of awareness and planning for the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers who hold the great majority of mainframe skills and knowledge today.

BI is an area of great interest, one that deserves our attention and analysis. Therefore, for this issue, we tapped the expertise of two individuals with a few decades of combined expertise in the field. Our objective is to benchmark the state of BI and allow our authors to comment on the emergent lessons.