2008 IT Projections Focus on Delivering Greater Consumer Value

Shortly after the first of the year, I shared several specific IT challenges Ecora expected organizations to face in 2008. The Sarbanes-Oxley Journal took enough interest in what we'd learned from our customers that they shared it in their January 28th edition and their sister publication, Regulations-Daily.

Several other publications have shared interesting thoughts on 2008 in recent weeks.CIO Insight shared the results of their survey of some 251 respondents on their organization's three most important business priorities for 2008. Not surprisingly, the top two responses were delivering better service to customers and improving business processes. Mirroring those priorities, the same individuals indicated that creating or improving strategic applications and expanding their IT infrastructure to keep up with growth were their top technology priorities for 2008.

Mario Moreira, in CM Crossroads, shared his predictions for the Configuration Management and Application Lifecycle Management categories in 2008 and they also feed into the idea of steamlining the delivery of business services with the intent of improving overall business productivity and performance.

Here is a summary of Mario's predictions:

"Prediction #1:  A need for more agility    I predict that we will see a continued focus on agility in the way we approach and deploy CM and ALM.  This takes several forms.  First it is the ability for companies to establish CM systems quickly and easily.  Second, it is the ability to increase productivity by having faster tools that allow for a continuous nature of progress.   

Prediction #2:  A need for more standard IT Standardization   I predict that we will see companies more focused on standard approaches to change control.    This takes several forms.  Part of this is driven by ITIL and ISO 20000 certification.  ITIL provides a set of practices and procedures where Change Management, Configuration Management, and Release Management make up key practices.  More companies are moving toward ITIL and the companion ISO 20000 certification.  ISO 20000 is the international standard for IT Service management and the management overview over the ITIL practices.      

Prediction #3:  More focus on Integrations 2008 will continue to see a growing need to have more of a need for ALM technology that has well integrated functionality to support processes across an application lifecycle and even into environments.  This will support the end-to-end view that many customers are looking for when managing their software development.   This also includes the continued shift where the consumers are looking for CM tools that better integrate with other tools in the application lifecycle and tools and require less integration effort."

  An article in Computerworld from Mary K. Pratt highlights 8 technologies to master in 2008. Given some of the other suggestions above, it is no surprise that virtualization, automation and integration make up 3 of the 8 areas Mary focuses her attention on. Concepts like Real-time collaboration, Web 2.0, consumer-oriented devices, and unified communications also make sense when so many organizations are trying to deliver more services to consumers, while maximizing the productivity of their people and physical resources.

Tomorrow, I'll share how Ecora has taken what we've heard from our customers and applied it to our latest release as an example of how vendors takes input from analysts, industry experts, customers and prospects and integrates it into the software development process.

Contributed by Mark Tordoff