This month's Cutter Benchmark Review, taking its inspiration from the current economic situation, termed by many the "great recession," tackles management in a crisis. Amidst all the turmoil, IT shops within firms and governmental institutions have to keep the operations humming while contributing to the survival of the organization. Setting the course for the IT function in a financial and economic storm is a subject that requires insight from some special contributors. We have assembled one of the best duos of CBR contributors since I took over editing of the publication in 2006. On the academic side we have Dorothy Leidner, the Randall W. and Sandra Ferguson Professor of Information Systems and Director of the Center for Knowledge Management at Baylor University (USA). On the practitioner side, we have one of my favorite IT leaders: Tom Murphy, Senior VP and CIO of AmerisourceBergen, a US $54 billion wholesale distributor of pharmaceuticals and related healthcare products.

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.

This installment of CBR focuses on an often-neglected issue: reverse logistics. To help us better understand the potential of the reverse logistics process, and keeping with our standard process, we recruited both an academic and a practicing professional. Our academic on this issue is a returning contributor, Kathryn Brohman, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Business at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (Canada). Our practitioner on this issue is Eileen Brown, an Associate Partner in IBM Global Business Services. Eileen has a wealth of experience in supply chain and operations issues having spent more than two decades in this space.

Outsourcing can be an important asset in the firm's arsenal, but it is no panacea, and it must be proactively managed. This very realization is what motivated our interest in an issue entirely dedicated to the client-vendor relationship in the IT outsourcing context.

This month's issue focuses on green IT and its measurement. Our objective is to benchmark current practice and offer tangible guidelines on the measurement of green IT and green IS efforts. Our academic contributor is Brian Donnellan, Professor of IS Innovation at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Co-Director of the Innovation Value Institute. Our practicing contributor is Bhuvan Unhelkar, a Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant.