Thinking Ahead - Emerging IT Trends & Pressures

Economic Downturn always has an impact on IT and declining profits during recessions has a tendency to place tremendous pressure on IT budgets. CIOs usually are called on to rationalize projects, downsize organizations, renegotiate contracts, and seek out other cost-reduction opportunities.
Technology budgets are larger, businesses have automated more processes, employees make greater use of tech-based productivity tools, and e-commerce has moved to the core of day-to-day operations. At the same time, IT organizations have established better mechanisms to govern IT decision making and have consolidated local IT operations to cut costs.

In a world where capital is at a premium, CFOs will seek to use IT assets as a lever to generate cash. Successful CIOs will give the senior-management team practical ideas on how to optimize cash. Successful CIOs will have to position themselves as honest brokers, pushing hard to evaluate IT investments in a fact-based way yet avoiding any perception of being allied with one business unit or another. Successful CIOs will manage their vendor relationships as a portfolio so they will be well positioned as new winners evolve.
The most effective course will be for CIOs to explain what it would take to improve the value equation for IT investments.
policy makers and regulators demand that IT systems capture more and better data in order to gain greater insight into and control over how banks manage risk, pharma companies manage drugs, and industrial companies affect the environment. Government officials also will monitor many legal and business rules more closely to ensure compliance with mandates. Successful CIOs should enhance their relationships with internal legal and corporate-affairs teams and be prepared to engage productively with regulators.

A study by CIOInsight.com titled “10 Biggest Technology Developments for the Future” on technologies that will shape the business management future reveals the following main trends

Green IT
Take advantage of the cost-saving potential of these technologies  
Business Process Modeling 
Robust, Agile, Flexible, and Events-Driven 

Collective Intelligence / Mobile Videoconferencing
The rise of collaborative and Web 2.0 technologies feeds into this growth area, giving businesses a new way for their employees to interact and share business intelligence and analytics.
Sensors/Smart Tags / Wearable/Implanted Technology
Self-Healing Networks /Autonomous Computing
The potential for computing resources that manage themselves can provide cost savings and free up IT resources
Social Network
Social networking is on the rise,but better ways are needed to manage it all.