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Trendspotting

What's up, what's down in IT.

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June 2007, Issue 68

Nucleus Research offers these insights . . .
	The Renaissance CIO These days, you almost have to be a Leonardo da Vinci to master the intricacies of BI and middleware without losing sight of the big business picture. Vendor- , constituency- , and team-management issues further obscure your landscape view. For better perspective—and, hopefully, more renaissance results—reserve one day a month for a deep technical dive with your team and balance it with a day of strategy brainstorming or business reading.
	Fewer Cooks In The Kitchen CIOs will benefit from recent BI, CRM, and SOA vendor consolidations. The fewer players there are, the fewer relationships CIOs need to manage. Consolidation also means improved productivity: With fewer solutions for tasks such as application development and CRM analytics, users require less training and don't spend as much time clicking among various screens. Such advantages are enough to make any CIO happy. CFOs will smile, too.
	SOA: More Than Integration People have long regarded service-oriented architecture as a way to make developers more productive and free up data from application silos. But because SOA is so standards-based and applications-agnostic, it can be used for many types of projects. A recent survey by Nucleus Research indicates that 45% of SOA users are leveraging it to improve processes—a capability that makes it especially valuable to business leaders. CIOs should take notice. IT executives who use SOA to boost revenue will play a greater role in formulating corporate strategy, thereby enhancing their stature in the boardroom.
	Go, Wiki Why not give your people the wikis they want? An alternative to traditional collaboration methods such as E-mail and portals, they're cost-effective and easy to use. In fact, CIOs who provide these tools are likely to see greater adoption and more efficient collaboration across the organization. Wiki technologies offer multiple delivery options, pricing structures, and service capabilities. Other attractive features include quick deployment and relatively low maintenance requirements.