What is Happening?  Over the next year, we are expecting that IT will primarily focus its efforts on tactically-focused initiatives that will support enterprises’ ability to execute in the short term.

Given these limitations, many important long-term IT initiatives will, at best, remain “works in progress” through 2013, as more immediate concerns force CIOs to prioritize IT responsiveness and agility over the completion of strategically-focused initiatives.

What is Happening?  The end of each year brings a multitude of retrospectives. In trade and business media, it comes in the form of editorials; in personal life, especially in the US, it comes in the form of Christmas letters and cards with family snapshots taken at various times and places throughout the year. In either case, the best effect of these retrospectives is to help kick off a “refresh” cycle, to help us sharpen our personal and professional focus on the future by recalling what’s been done in the past. In short, we take the opportunity to re-examine who we are and what we’ve done in order to help us refresh our position and approach to the future.

For us at Saugatuck, we felt that this would give us a great opportunity to refresh readers’ understanding of who we are and what we’ve done, and how we plan to approach the amazing innovative and shifting future of IT – and how it is used to create business change and competitive advantage.

Volumes have been written about the ways in which Client-Server architecture caused and/or enabled sweeping changes across the IT landscape. Those changes ranged from how IT solutions were acquired, through how solutions were implemented, to how the solutions and their underlying infrastructures were managed. In 2007 Saugatuck began publishing insights into how Cloud IT would also cause and/or enable major changes in IT organizations. Saugatuck has just published Strategic Perspective projecting that Cloud IT is becoming the third near-universally adopted IT infrastructure and will catalyze a total re-invention of the traditional IT organization.

Note: Ongoing Saugatuck subscription clients can access this premium research piece (1160MKT) by clicking here, and inputting your ID and password. Non-clients can purchase and download this premium research piece by clicking here.

The intersection between Mobility and Analytics is a potent one that strengthens both and reinforces industry trends that we have described as the Boundary Free Enterprise™. This is not a simple interaction, as it includes both BI and Analytics deployed to mobile devices; and the increasingly important enriched data feed from smartphones and tablets that increasingly includes social streams and location data. This intersection is important in its own right, as enhancer and enabler of a variety of threads in the evolution of Analytics. It is also important in supporting a range of developments across software development and consumption of Cloud IT.

Specific Mobile/Analytics entanglements include:

What is Happening?  As we noted last week, the end of each year tends to bring a fun, and often rewarding, look back at what we thought versus what has actually happened, and to make predictions about future directions and trends. This Research Alert is the second of a two-part series identifying the most impactful, emergent trends we see as clear and undeniable evidence of the emergent, and radical, transformation of IT and Business (1150RA, Looking Back and Forth: Ten Emergent Trends and Planning Positions for the 2013 Boundary-free Enterprise™, 06Dec2012).

In the spirit and context of looking back and forth, here’s a snapshot of previous Saugatuck predictions and expectations regarding Cloud IT, from SaaS to IaaS to PaaS. In 2008, we laid out a series of predictions for the 2011 – 2016 timeframe regarding SaaS and Cloud IT (486SSR, Enterprise Ready, or Not – SaaS Enters the Mainstream, 28July2008). Here’s the entire list of critical changes that we expected to see within that specified timeframe: