In these five years of charting IT budgets and the budgeting process, we have documented the roller-coaster ride that IT shops around the globe have been on as things went from good times to perhaps the greatest economic crisis ever to strike the global economy to now slowly and gingerly climbing back out of the recession. Because we have been able to keep our team of experts intact and to maintain the core set of survey questions we ask of the respondents, we have learned quite a bit about the manner in which modern organizations react (and should react) to these kinds of events. We have learned, for example that the knee-jerk reaction typical of past crises whereby the firm would slash IT budgets seeking to "trim the fat" and "reduce overhead" wasn't exactly the case. In last year's survey, we found that "while organizations are indeed cutting projects and limiting their exposure by reducing investments in IT, they are also limiting reductions in the IT shop as much as possible knowing that IT assets and knowledge lost during a downturn cannot be readily rebuilt and scaled once the economy turns. As a consequence, the shape that this downturn has been taking for IT and IT professionals is likely different than the historical pattern of deep cost-cutting measures."

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus at the intersection of three topics discussed previously: mobile technology (Vol. 9, No. 3) on the one hand and privacy (Vol. 6, No. 1) and security (Vol. 5, No. 12) on the other. We do so because we feel that these topics, interesting each on its own, take on renewed relevance when combined.

This month, we have tapped into the expertise and knowledge of two contributors with significant backgrounds in e-learning. On the academic side is Aurelio Ravarini, Senior Assistant Professor of IS at Università Carlo Cattaneo (LIUC, Italy) and Director with LIUC's CETIC, Research Center on Information Systems. Many of you will recall Aurelio as a past contributor to CBR; he was our academic expert on the issues on content management systems (Vol. 6, No. 4) and software as a service (Vol. 9, No. 4 ). Our practitioner author is Gianni Maria Strada, a former HR executive of several US corporations and current Managing Partner of PeoplePoint, a boutique HR consulting firm focused on major organizational change processes. Both contributors have considerable experience with the organizational implementation of software applications and their consequential organizational change processes.

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we turn to a topic discussed previously in November 2008 (Vol. 8, No. 11) and July 2007 (Vol. 7, No. 7): project management. As readers of CBR know, we get our inspiration and ideas for topics from two sources. First, we get inspiration from current events, new trends, new technologies, and generally from being aware and plugged into what is going on in the world of IT. At the same time, we maintain a constant ear to the ground and stick with a reality check by being attentive and responsive to the Cutter Consortium client base. We pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants are bidding for and working on. We also monitor the types of requests that Cutter clients make and we apply firsthand research at Cutter Summits held across the globe.

With this month's CBR we crafted one such issue on a topic that is losing some of the buzz surrounding it -- and for that very reason may be moving into its most productive phase! Let me take a tangent here. Have you ever noticed how there are largely two broad sets of people: those who talk and those who do? OK, that may be an oversimplification (how uncharacteristic for an academic you may say), as there are plenty of variations between these two extremes, but go with me here for a minute. I'm sure you remember the many people you have met in your life who have told you how good they are, how much they have achieved, how close they were to getting that new position, and so on. Very often this façade of certainty and bravado hides a relatively thin record of real accomplishments; conversely, there is a broad group of extremely accomplished people who let the facts speak for themselves.