Have no fear that "Adam Smith, Esq." is going to morph into a
boot-licking, reverential conduit for re-distributing
the year-end natterings of those ink-stained
scribes from the MSM and the high-profile consultancies
hoping to goose their annual bonus by producing yet
another "ten trends…" or such-like:  The predictions
tend to the bullet-proof, in that they flunk the fundamental
tenet of vector analysis, which is that to fully specify
the characteristics of a vector one must define it
in all four dimensions (the fourth being time, or with
objects in motion, speed).  "X is going to increase/decrease/start/stop,"
but omitted is where, when, or how fast.

(And lest you think I harbor a secret intellectual temptation
to indulge in potentially-entertaining year-end prognostication
myself, take a look at David
Maister‘s comment to an
earlier post: 

"With no disrespect to any law or consulting firm named
here, I am deeply skeptical about all this. In the
past, when asked to talk about the “Trends in the Profession” I
used to use a 10-year-old slide which referred to no
specific profession or country. Everyone fell for it
– they all agreed that, yes these are the trends we
will have to face.")

Nevertheless, sometimes consensus surveys are used to extrapolate
trends, and they have value if only for the snapshot
they provide of the common wisdom at a point in time.

Consider, then, CIO Insight‘s year-end survey of nearly
6,000 CIO’s and CTO’s (64%) and other top executives
(36%), which generated no fewer than thirty "trends." 

A prefatory note:  The results of some of the non-trend-generating
questions are intrinsicially interesting.   Two of the
more hopeful:  #1:  "Our research also indicates that
companies are giving more employees access to business
intelligence tools, in hopes they apply the insights
those systems generate."  Knowledge is power; distribute
power lest it corrupt.   And #2:  78% of companies plan
to increase profits through growth, not cost reduction.
Gordon Bethune, the legendary former turn-around CEO
of Continental Airlines, like to make the latter point
with his pizza analogy: "The biggest cost component
of a pizza is the cheese; if you’re serious about cutting
costs, eliminate the cheese."
 

Off, then, to the trends.  And don’t worry; I’ve narrowed
their thirty down to four of note to us:

• Trend 7: The Hunger for Analysis
  and Intelligence Will Keep Growing:  By this,
  they mean "Business Intelligence," and specifically
  what I’ve
  called the second generation of "BI:" 
  "Already, mid-level managers and planning staff use
  BI tools at 61 percent of companies. […] This widening
  use of ever more powerful analytical tools has enormous
  potential for the future. But the extent to which that
  potential is met will depend on how well the BI system
  connects to strategy and user needs."

• Trend 22: IT Architecture Becomes Critical to Business
  Strategy:  "What once appeared arcane will become
  more and more central. As high-growth companies have
  figured out, IT architecture and infrastructure have
  never been so closely tied to corporate strategy as
  they are today. It doesn’t matter whether CIOs are
  trying to achieve faster growth, better business processes,
  lower costs or global expansion."  In other
  words, the basic "hygiene" of your information systems
  has to be rock-solid.  (1) Secure, reliable data
  (2) shared across all your offices and employees (3)
  on a common platform.
• Trend 24: Data Integration Is the Technology Pressure
  Point:  "Data quality will go from nice-to-have
  to need-to-have. Flexibility and openness remain nothing
  but talk, while standardization and virtualization
  remain useless, unless companies can reliably integrate
  their systems and ensure the quality of their data."  It’s
  not just your corporate clients struggling with Sarbanes-Oxley
  that have to get their "data" squeaky-clean; it’s your
  own firm as well.  Don’t your clients have every
  right to expect you can and do handle your own data
  with the utmost scrupulousness?
• Trend 27: Knowledge Management Regains Respect:  Isn’t
  this the perennial whipping boy, the classic example
  of the "evergreen" prediction?  (My
  favorite is, "Brazil will lead the way the next
  decade,"
  which we’ve been hearing since before Sputnik.)  But
  listen to what CIO Insight has to say at
  some length about KM (emphasis supplied):

  "CIOs haven’t given
  up on its promise. Knowledge management has long
  suffered a bad rap as a sexy technology that falls
  short on delivering business value. But for two
  years in a row, KM has ranked a respectable 7th
  on our list of critical technologies. (Twenty-one
  technologies were ranked on this list in 2005.)
  This is happening in part because many
  of the technologies that fall under the aegis of
  KM have come into their own: collaboration tools, corporate portals,
  content management and business intelligence.

  "These technologies aren’t mere repositories for
  knowledge, as earlier KM systems tended to be.
  They route knowledge to the
  people who need it,
  or embed what the company has learned into a process.
  As companies find these knowledge-managing technologies
  helpful, they’ll look for new, effective ways to
  manage corporate know-how and put it to work."

I would be the last person to tell you that KM is
easy, and I’m both unsurprised and essentially unperturbed
that it’s taking us so long to get it right.  We
are, after all, dealing in some cases with "knowledge"
that is so contextual and nuanced as to be almost ineffable.  And
it’s not just those at the peak of the empyrean professions:   Consider
the story in today’s WSJ of the technology
columnist trying to make polite conversation with a
FedEx guy in a high-rise office elevator.  WSJ
Guy:  "So, is it quicker to work top to bottom
or bottom to top?"  FedEx Guy (dead
serious):  "It depends on the time of day."

Put that in a database!