Looking Ahead: Shaping IT Strategy in the Future

Trends in IT Strategy Information technology has become a pervasive part of doing business in nearly all organizations during the last decade. It has also dramatically shifted roles, moving from mostly automating back-office processes to becoming a strategic enabler of new offerings and new ways of doing business. While this has manifested itself in many ways, from the record rise in employee productivity over the past several years to the creation of innovative new products and services that would have been impossible several years ago, IT’s coming of age has brought with it new challenges for leaders. As we are all aware, the ever-increasing rate of change in IT makes it ever more difficult to accurately predict future needs. The capabilities of and connectivity driven by IT have also, in the opinion of many, changed the fundamental nature of business, causing product life cycles to shorten, lowering switching costs for customers, and increasing the overall uncertainty that all organizations operate in. Colleges and universities have not been immune to such technology-driven change. Significant impacts have occurred in administrative areas like admissions, registration, and academic advising, where self-service has become a necessity and students have far superior access to information than just a few years ago. While IT has substantially impacted student and business services, perhaps no other area has been more radically altered than faculty research. In environmental, space, oceanic, and atmospheric sciences, the collection of large datasets is more the rule than the exception. These fields are defined increasingly by the development of computer-based predictive simulations and models. More traditional disciplines such as history and art history are being rethought with the emergence of resources such as ARTstor and projects such as the Valley of the Shadow project.1 Life sciences research,