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This is going to be a bad year for IT. While budgeting delays may seem to be the main cause for that, and assuming the current economic crisis is coming to close, I think there is more to it then that.

While IT still matters, even after all this time, I think most of the interesting stuff in IT in the past 18 months or so have happened outside the corporate and SME environments. It happened in the hypesphere called the cloud and in the consumer electronic playground. In the last decade corporate IT has moved from building to maintaining, and in doing so have migrated from value added units to being a cost center.

The hype of the cloud and fancy hand held devices offered very little in adding value to IT, it was other ways of doing the same, only letting other take the lead. Moving from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps is not much more interesting or innovative the moving to Microsoft Exchange (hosted or local), IBM Notes or Yahoo Mail. It might have been interesting if an overhaul of the way LA municipality works was the reason or outcome.

What does constitute an change in IT which provides value. Novell's Pulse might be one. It is interesting not only because of functionality, but it shows possible new way of doing stuff, coming from a company which looks boring: Novell.

IT should take this year to learn assertiveness. Think like Google in your own back yard. Go into projects not only because you are assured of successes in them, but into projects that might fail. Tell vendors and management that you will be using technologies in ways which are not vendors certified, but can provide benefits to the company.

When the crisis is over, we can start making IT matter again.