Eight Mega-Trends: Our Latest Research
The content of Symposium/ITxpo this spring will be streaming through eight major trends impacting all IT organizations. These are big-impact trends that should be on your radar.

Commoditizing the Tech Sector
The IT industry is in turmoil. Perpetuating Moore's Law requires ever-increasing scale economies. How do you navigate this shifting sea of change and dropping prices when placing your bets on the future?

Globalizing of Supply and Demand
As globalization continues, companies will have to deal with discontinuities on both the supply (resources) front and the demand (revenue) front. China and India will continue to increase their effect on the global economy. Companies will have to understand what that means for business and what IT must do to support a drastically altering business environment.

Virtualizing the Enterprise Platform
The computational wall socket: agile, open, service-oriented, on-demand scalable, perfectly reliable, heterogeneous, lights-out and billed by the unit. It's coming. Fast. While virtualization is still a complex maze, there are some dead certainties, and dead ends to avoid.

Freeing Communications
IP reigns. The public switched telephone network is being brushed aside as the Internet dominates voice and entertainment. Wireless services are proliferating but must evolve or be marginalized. A massively connected world will create many new opportunities, and size won't matter: innovative strategies will separate the leaders from the also-rans. The most disruptive new technologies will be 4G, location services, telepresence, sensor nets, and open source telephony.

Socializing Technology
Social interaction will subsume information technology, reordering how we work, where we live, what we do, and how we do it. Transactions will cease to be the center of the IT universe as IT will exert more of an effect on the social and economic structures of the whole 6+ billion-person world than either automobiles or mass transportation.

Revolutionizing Industries
Flexibility and adaptability are competitive differentiators today. Tomorrow, they will be the price of entry. Radical and constant change will be accelerated by new business drivers, technology innovation, environmental factors, and shifts in the social and political landscape. Future success will demand continuous revolutionary behavior and structures.

Inspiring Innovation
Fighting commoditization, the technology industry is innovating more furiously. Whole new categories are emerging from the lab into the mainstream -- robotics, social analytics, display surfacing, augmented reality, virtual world economies, and others.

Transforming IS Management
IT organization will be radically transformed. Business process, business information, and business relationship will be fused with technology. Operational excellence will have to be stronger than ever. Strategic IT will matter a lot. The management of IT, which is competitively crucial to market leaders and fast followers today, will have to be upgraded continuously with major changes to people, skills, focal points, methods and strategies.