Two trends in information technology will become increasingly important to CIOs in 2007: a migration to service-oriented architectures and the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations. These are among the results of our most recent survey of senior IT executives. The survey asked CIOs and other senior executives in North American companies about their plans for the coming year.1
New technologies and trends constantly compete for a share of the enterprise IT budget, and during each cycle, one or two rise above the others to become a major focus for CIOs. In 2006 two areas of critical focus have been software as a service and server consolidation and virtualization—two trends that CIOs, a year earlier, had cited as important.2
As those technologies gain traction, executives are also signaling interest in two further trends to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Sixty-four percent of the respondents to the 2006 survey told us they plan to implement service-oriented architectures in the coming year. This strong response suggests that the thinking about IT architectures is shifting to embrace global standards for interaction, both internally and with external partners and suppliers. Advocates of service-oriented architectures expect them to make IT more flexible,...