Excerpts from an article at Mckinsey Quarterly:

Two trends in information technology will become increasingly important to CIOs in 2007: a migration to service-oriented architectures and the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations. These are among the results of our most recent survey of senior IT executives. The survey asked CIOs and other senior executives in North American companies about their plans for the coming year.

48 percent of the CIOs we surveyed in 2006 said that they plan to implement service-oriented architectures for integration with external trading partners in 2007. Traditionally, companies pilot any new integration technology within the firewall, and broader adoption for integration with trading partners follows a few years later. The fact that so many IT departments are already moving beyond the internal pilot stage means that enthusiasm for this trend is high. What's more, the wide-spread adoption of software as a service promises to encourage the spread of service-oriented architectures, because they make it easier to integrate enterprise systems with applications from third-party vendors.

The second trend poised to strengthen in 2007 is the application of lean-manufacturing principles to data centers. In our recent survey, 28 percent of the respondents said that they had already applied or decided to apply lean principles to improve their data center operations. Lean, of course, isn't a technology but rather a methodology applied to processes-originally in manufacturing operations but increasingly within services, including IT.

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Prashanth Rai