If you're looking for signs that things may be getting better in the realm of IT investment, the past few weeks provided me with a number of positive antecedents that back up IDC's Predictions for 2010.

In late February, I was at an event in New York City sponsored by a leading NetApp reseller.  CIOs from a number of leading finance, entertainment, life sciences, and manufacturing enterprises were trying to come to grips with what the "cloud" meant for their businesses.  Aside from the usual, and quite legitimate, concerns about security and sound IT governance, the most interesting theme was that none of them talked about "cloud" as a cost savings option (a major theme in the past year).  Their interest in cloud focused on accelerating business expansion and introducing new services for employees and customers.

Yesterday, I returned from a event put on by Pillar Data Systems for its customers.  After a year of cancellations and conversion to "virtual" events, it is heartening to see that IT suppliers again recognize the importance of talking directly with a large pool of customers and, more important, are making it easier for customers to talk face to face with each other.  Aggressive consolidation and virtualization were on the top of everyone's agenda, but so was new service activities.  For some, this translated into major expansions in the use of business intelligence and data analytics.  For others, digitizing and intelligently archiving intellectual property assets were the top concerns and priorities.

IDC's 2009 Corporate eDiscovery Technology Trends Survey concludes that among the most litigious and highly regulated industries, average ESI collection volumes per matter are rising; At the same time, corporate eDiscovery technology budgets are flat or declining. The early results of the 2010 study  suggest a slight improvement in budgets; however, the ESI volume trends persist.  The corporate litigants' challenges greatly influenced the product and service priorities of the technology vendor community, and are reflected in the product announcements during LegalTech NYC 2010 (Feb 1-3).  This year, vendors announced solutions that address the corporate litigants' demands for cost efficiencies and for enhanced risk management and legal strategies.  These product releases target corporate litigants who want to take core e-discovery activities in-house and those who are rationalizing their technologies and service providers

Over a business dinner Monday evening, to no one’s surprise (!), we had an energetic conversation about the 2010 economic outlook, about IT spending, about how IT organizations from different sectors could be expected to perform -- and how IT professionals should approach "capital spending freezes."

At a time when resource prioritization for IT can be a matter of survival, life is not getting any easier in the politically charged environments of corporate Program Management Offices (PMOs) and Enterprise Program Management Offices (EPMOs). These organizations – when well run – help to create effective criteria for resource and project portfolio decision-making. At their best, PMOs enable collaboration across disparate business units, IT and executive decision-makers and can help to promote effective collaboration, and (more) consistent project and portfolio management practices.

As I consider our move into the next year, a variety of disruptive trends set the stage for a challenging beginning to 2010 for IT departments and their business stakeholders. In the wake of staff downsizing for quality, development and change management teams over the past 12-15 months, companies are experiencing the consequences of poorer management of software projects. It simply isn’t possible to do that much “more” with “less” people, fewer resources, and increased business and technology complexity.

Over the past week, the New York Times published a series of  articles on the growing importance of digital information in industries ranging from retail to health care to media/entertainment. I took some time over the holiday season to think about all the ways that companies rely on an expanding set of applications to compete in this difficult and rapidly changing business environment.  They are: