What's taking on increased strategic importance in 2007?

Application Platforms on the Verge of Change
Application platforms will go through dramatic evolution due to Web 2.0, SaaS, advanced SOA and extreme transaction processing. Products will remain viable, but users focused on competitive advantage through IT should prepare for potential technological discontinuity and vendor turmoil.

SOA Advances
Service-oriented architecture is a rapidly emerging priority for most mainstream software projects. With its reality come the pains of growth. Here, we project some key milestones and obstacles on the path of SOA.

Application Strategy and Governance Emerge as Core IT Competencies
Effective application strategy cannot occur on an ad hoc basis. Strategic planning that takes into account key application technology trends must be implemented by the enterprise together with effective governance mechanisms. Both will be an increasingly core IT competency through 2012.

Process, Technology and Design Agility Will Drive Superior Supply Chain Performance
Through 2010, supply chains will have to acquire agile supply chain design capability, business process platform-enabled innovation and procurement specialization to better align with market and product segment needs, forcing a re-evaluation where supply chain management vendors will be a source of ...

Pervasive Use of Business Intelligence Will Pressure Market
In 2007, organizations' demands for business intelligence capabilities will increase rapidly. This will prompt adoption of new technologies, lead to new styles of deployment and make BI environments even more chaotic.

Internal Skills Are Inadequate for BPM Maturity
Through 2010, emerging and critical business process improvement roles will be difficult to staff and retain. Demand for process champions, business process architects and business process analysts will be particularly acute. Users must be creative in sourcing and developing these roles.

Align BPM and SOA Initiatives Now to Increase Chances of Becoming a Leader by 2010
Starting in 2007, business process management will take a more active role, driving service-oriented architecture initiatives by placing a business face on a technology-centric activity. BPM will serve as the catalyst for cultural and organizational changes that many enterprises will fail to make.

Collaboration Rebels Innovate While Empires Consolidate
It's difficult to manage deployment of mature collaboration technologies and also benefit from emerging ones. Our predictions and recommendations can help you strike a profitable balance between the two.

A Return to Growth Fuels Marketing Technology Spending
Marketing automation is one of the fastest-growing CRM investment areas at an approximate 16% compound annual growth rate. This trend will continue through 2011 as adoption grows rapidly for marketing resource, lead, online marketing and business-to-business campaign management solutions.

Poor Customer Service Will Undercut All IT Efforts
In 2007, enterprises will focus on incremental customer support system process improvements because of two trends: IT will remain isolated from strategic planners of customer experience, and application suite vendors will concentrate on upgrading product lines.

Emerging Trends Drive Disruptive Innovation
New sources of innovation will include focusing productivity improvements on revenue-generating business activities, redefining healthcare services in the face of major demographic shifts, creating IT solutions for third-world countries, and bringing open source into the mainstream.

Big Changes Ahead in the High-Performance Workplace
Performance will be enhanced if firms help employees improve the non-routine aspects of their jobs. Socializing, and finding the right people and information to work with, are key. IT will do this very differently by 2010.

Information Infrastructure Emerges
Organizations increasingly aim to access and leverage all data types across the business, making information part of business infrastructure. Our predictions focus on the user demands, emerging practices, and technology changes which will shape the future of information infrastructure.

Information Infrastructure: Content Matters
Our predictions for 2007 reflect the growing demand for access to data of all kinds from across user organizations. We also consider emerging practices and changes in data and content-centric technologies.

CIOs and IT Leaders Enter the Decision-Making Discomfort Zone
Welcome to the "discomfort zone." In an era of hyper-connected businesses, few enterprises will meet their strategic objectives without integrating business and IT strategic decision making. The "us vs. them" mentality will go away, presenting new opportunities and challenges.

Investing in IT Operations Management to Unleash Business Value
Investing in IT Operations Management to Unleash Business Value.

Risk Management, Ethics, Governance and Compliance
Risk management, ethics and compliance are blurring. None of these topics are technologies, but to be effectively performed, they all require the IT organization to move beyond costly and damaging reactive remediation to proactive performance management and process improvement.

Information Security – Secure Business Enablement
Enterprises must ensure that critical business processes are conducted securely. Consumer protection and identity management are major issues within the information security industry.

Brace Yourself for the Next Wave of Server Technology
The rapid onslaught of new technology is challenging the data center as never before. The IT organization needs to brace itself for new styles of server virtualization, another wave of server appliances and more diskless blades.

Offshore Outsourcing Moves Beyond Labor Arbitrage
Globalization has had a significant impact on the demand and supply side of the IT organization. Investments in automation, technology and growth of skilled resources challenge paradigms for how and where IT is delivered and consumed.

IT Outsourcing Starts to Break From Tradition
Large enterprises' flexibility and agility needs will force changes in the service blend included in IT outsourcing contracts and affect renewal rates. Some small and midsize businesses will take nontraditional paths for service delivery, regardless of the attention from large IT services providers.

Web 2.0 and Consumerization Forge Into the Enterprise
Web 2.0 and consumerization are two of the most-prominent themes in Gartner research. As they feed and amplify one another, we believe that many provocative predictions will occur.