This month we're featuring research that distills the current state of affairs for enterprise IT professionals and the technology domains they worry most about.

Take application development, for example. We recently surveyed more than 2,200 technology decision-makers
across North America and Europe to understand the state of app dev in both enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). We found that in 2007 new software projects will consume more of the IT budget than in past years, and adoption of Java/J2EE and .NET will continue to vary significantly by region and company size.

We also examine the application development profession with Forrester's first ever Role Overview -- a synopsis of research most vital to a particular job; in this case, a summary of our advice on what software to build, how to build it, and the tools and technologies to use along the way.

For IT professionals who wear a business process or marketing hat, we detail six trends to watch this year in customer relationship management (CRM), including the impact of global CRM and service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards and the latest struggles to create one version of the truth out of customer data. One silver bullet hopeful is master data management (MDM), but we found in our analysis of 2007 MDM trends that technology is only a small part of the puzzle. Early adopters have reached a growing consensus that MDM requires significant business process transformation of the information supply chain.

Business process acumen is vital to many more IT initiatives than just MDM, but what are the core IT skill sets that CIOs look for today? Our research on hot IT skill areas in 2007 shows that project management, security, and architecture skills top the list of recruiting needs in 2007, while change management, service management, and vendor management are enterprises' most important training priorities.

Finally, we describe the current and future state of vendor affairs in two important areas. For IT infrastructure professionals, our research on the state of IT management software shows that business service management and configuration management databases (CMDB) represent the two central pillars of a high-growth market. For information and knowledge management professionals, we examine Microsoft's support for enterprise content management (ECM) in its Office SharePoint Server 2007 product. Microsoft has taken its first real crack at providing a single platform to address an enterprise's ECM needs, but users will have to be patient while Microsoft matures its capabilities.

Please enjoy this research and help us improve our quality by sharing your feedback. Online, to the right of each report, you'll see an option to rate the document and provide comments. We take quality very seriously, and we would appreciate your input.

Sincerely,

Tom Pohlmann
Vice President
Information Technology Research

New Forrester Wave Evaluations

Since our last First Look, three new Forrester Wave evaluations aimed at information and business process professionals hit the Web site, including one on records management, where we found CA MDY, Open Text, and IBM FileNet to stand apart. Each of these vendors has strong frameworks for federated records management and flexible options for abstracting records management functionality into various user interfaces.

We also continued our evaluation of the key players in the broad CRM market, with two new evaluations: midmarket CRM suites and enterprise CRM suites for financial services.

Other Forrester Wave evaluations targeted at IT decision-makers and slated to go live include providers of: applications outsourcing, WLAN infrastructure, business service management, and partner connectivity and collaboration tools.

Other New, Relevant Reads

• For Enterprise Architects: Open Solutions Alliance Pursues Application Integration

• For Chief Information Officers: IT Leadership Maturity Checkup

• For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals: Social Computing Upends Past Knowledge Management Archetypes

• For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals: Optimizing Investments In Speech Applications

• For Security & Risk Management Professionals: Adopting An Enterprise Approach To Encryption

• For Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals: Why Vendor Management Teams Need Specialized Tools For Outsourcing Governance

• For Application Development & Program Management Professionals: Balancing The Costs And Benefits Of Software Modeling

• For Business Process & Applications Professionals: ePurchasing Software Market

Research Referenced In This Issue Adopting An Enterprise Approach To Encryption (41736) Balancing The Costs And Benefits Of Software Modeling (41092) Demystifying EA Programs (41775) ePurchasing Software Market (40454) IT Leadership Maturity Checkup (41041) Microsoft's 2007 Enterprise Content Management Platform (41346) Mobile Operating Systems (41413) Open Solutions Alliance Pursues Application Integration (41778) Optimizing Investments In Speech Applications (41570) Prepare To Be Challenged On Web Accessibility Compliance (41644) Social Computing Upends Past Knowledge Management Archetypes (41369) The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise CRM Suites For Financial Services, Q1 2007 (41698) The Forrester Wave™: Midmarket CRM Suites, Q1 2007 (40595) The Forrester Wave™: Records Management, Q1 2007 (39645) The IT Management Software Market (41738) The State Of Application Development In Enterprises And SMBs (41389) Trends 2007: Customer Relationship Management (41456) Trends 2007: Hot IT Skill Areas (41759) Trends 2007: Master Data Management (41347) Why Vendor Management Teams Need Specialized Tools For Outsourcing Governance (41478)

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