With the new year upon us, we asked Cutter’s Senior Consultants and Fellows for their business technology predictions. Their perspectives — as always — are quite thoughtful, thought-provoking, and varied. Projections cover the changing role of the CIO, what will happen in enterprise architecture, the increasing adoption of agile, the explosion of cloud computing, the impact of green initiatives, and more.

We’re posting all the predictions on the Cutter website as they come in. Here are some excerpts:

Israel Gat: I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. San Murugesan: In 2010 and beyond, we will see growing interest and major developments in cloud computing, green IT, and mobile systems and applications. Steve Andriole: By 2015, operational technology requirements have merged with business requirements and vice versa. Vince Kellen: Social network Read more …

As 2009 brings dramatic change to the economy, politics, and IT, some consistency might be in order. So, as I have in past years, I’m making suggestions for New Year’s resolutions for enterprise architects.

Execute on Your Roadmap Architecture takes a long time to develop and deliver. There’s a bewildering array of models, processes, options, priorities, and skills needed to achieve enterprise goals. Of course, this cannot be delivered all at once but needs to be phased in over time. How do we know what to do when? First, we need to have a vision of our architectural end state (the point at which enterprise IT is in alignment with both business and technology goals and strategy). Then, we try to understand the dependencies between things, identify current skill sets and training needs, and make a plan to get there. Read more …

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives. In fact, according to the results of our recent survey, slightly more than one-quarter of end-user organizations are currently using Web 2.0 techniques to support their BI users. This finding comes from a survey conducted in October 2008 of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide. It was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

Specifically, survey participants were asked “Is your organization using blogs, wikis, or other ‘Web 2.0′ technologies to support its BI efforts/users with collaboration capabilities (e.g., to provide analysts, managers, and other users with the ability to Read more …

With 2009 looming large, ugly and just around the corner, it’s time for the obligatory prognostications. Boy is this difficult… Hmmm. What will next year bring? Any wild guesses?

Rather than focus on the dark clouds, I am going to first look for the silver lining ahead.

Trend 1: Firms will try to remove redundant islands of business process and technology. Already system integrators and enterprise vendors are polishing their CFO pitches. In 2009, big vendors won’t be selling the CIO. They will be selling the person telling the CIO to cut budgets. 2009 may be the year that companies try to get a leg up on business process and enterprise system consolidation to further reduce the cost of IT and the cost of inefficient business processes. Maybe it will be déjà vu all over again as we may Read more …

Is information technology accelerating the wild swings in the market?

Oil barrel prices, thought to cross over $200 are now around $50. The stock market jitters 5% – 7% in a day looking like warmed-up jello. The talking heads on TV are talking with more emotion and I can see their veins popping on my high definition TV. Watching the stock market, I get the sense we are behaving like a large flock of birds. At the first sign of any perceived threat and the lead bird takes off and the whole flock blindly follows.

The whole world is joined together in a synchronous flow of information, made possible via the information technology of the past decade. We are all jumping up and down at the same time in our small pool making larger and larger waves and splashing water all Read more …

For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one.

President-elect Barack Obama is going to be the US’s first tech-savvy president who understands the power of the Internet. It is obviously overstated, but some political observers, such as Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, claimed that, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.”

During the campaign, President-elect Obama made several wide-ranging promises in regard to technology. For instance, he promised to protect the openness of the Internet by strongly supporting the principle of Net neutrality; he promised to deploy a modern communications infrastructure to get broadband to every community in America, and he promised to employ technology and innovation to solve our nation’s Read more …

For Abraham Lincoln, it was the telegraph. For John F. Kennedy it was the television. For Barak Obama, it is Web 2.0.

Each of these politicians proved adept at adapting new technologies to communicate. Lincoln took to the telegraph and used it for rapid communication. No doubt the advantages of the telegraph were on Lincoln’s mind when we composed the short and compact Gettysburg address. Unlike keynote speaker, Edward Everett’s 13,600-word, two-hour oration, Lincoln’s ten sentence and 272-word address fit neatly on the front pages of newspapers across Europe.

In the famous Richard Nixon-Kennedy television debates, the youthful Kennedy performed well on television. Nixon, ill at the time, looked ill on television. Kennedy knew television favored him and took advantage of it. Those who watched the debates felt Kennedy was the winner.

By putting into service blogs, YouTube, constant email Read more …