At this time of year, journalists love to compose lists to fill demand for content that can be rolled out at some point in the media dog days over the festive period, even if the writers themselves have disappeared off on holiday.
Nothing wrong with that, so here is ours, but in the form of an antidote, suggesting some things that won’t happen next year.
5. Broad deployment of business intelligence tools.
Lots of people think that BI tools will be deployed on more desktops so end-users can better understand trends — and, naturally, BI vendors are keen to expand from their executive customer base. But BI is advanced software for advanced people and giving full-scale analysis tools to the troops is a bit like providing a Howitzer to get rid of a mouse — silly and really quite dangerous too. Making the tools cheap and more usable is just marketing department window dressing.
4. Going green.
It’s a myth that IT has gone green. Most CIOs care acutely about getting more value from their investments and part of the remit is to cut costs wherever possible, including electricity consumption. Saving the planet is just a bonus.
How to sell green IT to your senior managers
3. Sorting out ERP strategies.
There will be a time for many companies to make sense of the ragbag of enterprise applications they have assembled or inherited. But with SAP and Oracle still making sense of the applications they have put together through acquisitions, it won’t be 2009.
Five things to know before committing to SAP
2. Offshoring booms.
Some people think that going into recession means it’s time to offshore anything that moves. Maybe there will be a spike somewhere but it won’t come from financial services, the travel sector or other hard-hit verticals that will seek to lie low in 2009 rather than drive projects, no matter their perception of offshore value.
Offshoring strategies – what is a good number of providers?
1. Desktop refresh cycles.
Windows Vista was an OS too far for Microsoft. And PCs bought even five years ago still have plenty of CPU, RAM and disk headroom in most cases. Conclusion: the PC refresh cycle can wait another year. That’s basically the same advice we got in 2003.