Andrew Hebden is Assistant Editor (Business) of The Journal »
Matt James runs fingerprint-recognition technology firm UKB Security »
James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Phil Renton is managing director of North East IT empire Croft »
Matthew Rippon is an IP lawyer for BHP Law »
Formerly editor of a national business lifestyle magazine, Jez Davison is a business writer for the Evening Gazette in Teesside »
Ian Brown, Northumberland farmer and businessman writes about the agricultural industry »
Accessibilty Champion Steve Wilkinson on the importance of inclusion »
Shared Interest Staff at Newcastle's fair trade firm blog on their latest international missions »
PR man David Honeywell on raising your profile in the right places »
Marion Bernard is from NorthStar Equity Investors »
Caroline Theobald is the Managing Director of Bridge Club Ltd »
John Barton of Renew, on the region's low carbon and sustainable energy agenda »
Paul Williamson is Senior Partner at Deloitte »
Stephen Hall is Tax Partner at Deloitte »Waterstons' executive consultant Alistair McLeod shares his predictions for the year ahead...
The New Year will hold some interesting challenges for Information Technology as the predicted slowdown in the economy begins to bite. It will put pressure on costs and ultimately the IT budget and during these periods that IT investments need to be managed wisely. IT should have its roots embedded into the framework of an organisation both as a commodity and a strategic enabler, and will be increasingly pulled in opposite directions by these competing forces. It will require tight management from a new breed of IT Manager who has business and leadership skills and can create a balance between focus on the vulnerabilities of not implementing a technology against using IT to gain a competitive advantage or drive change within the business.
Virtualisation technologies will gain more prominence to provide the simplification of the IT infrastructure and reduction in total cost of ownership, allowing the IT function to concentrate on value adding projects. For organisations with a green agenda, the technology can also help with energy saving by reducing the number of physical servers and ultimately the size of server rooms (server power usage accounts for 1% of the worlds energy consumption).
Other growth areas include dynamic business integration to connect people, teams, information and clients by using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint and Workflow applications.
Finally Business Intelligence (BI) is back on the agenda in 2008 driven by the current economic climate and the failure of past projects to deliver reliable and useful management information. Many BI initiatives that were sanctioned two to three years ago have not delivered either because of poor data warehouse design, inaccurate information or a misguided investment in expensive third party reporting tools. Organisations will have to address these issues to provide visibility of performance and understand how the changes to the economy will affect them.
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