James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » 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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