Authors: Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee

Earlier this calendar quarter, Saugatuck Technology surveyed its clients and other readers of its’ weekly Research Alerts and monthly Strategic Perspectives regarding areas of their research interest.  The results provide a snapshot of current levels of interest in key areas of IT and business management and spending, including hot/emerging topics, and the topics most likely to impact IT vendor business planning, and user IT/business strategy and planning, over the next 12 to 24 months.

The survey was not designed or intended to provide scientific levels of accuracy, but to provide a means to guide the development of our research agenda for the next six-to-twelve months – specific to Saugatuck’s mix of research members (see Figure 1). We’ve broken the ranked list into four groups, ranked from top to bottom according to the number of responses and resulting levels of interest in each topic. The ranking groups are as follows:

• Critical: Topics receiving more than 70 percent of the total responses
• Important: Topics receiving  between 50 percent and 70 percent of responses
• Significant: Topics receiving between 25 and 50 percent of responses
• Limited/Emerging: Topics receiving less than 25 percent of responses