Japan's IT organizations face pressure to cut costs and enable compliance in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment. Correspondingly, technology investments related to compliance occupy the highest positions on spending priority lists. However, companies are slow to adopt several critical strategies to deliver cost reduction and increased flexibility, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), open source, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and offshore development. IT needs to accelerate efforts to leverage these strategies while marketing itself to the lines of business and increasing business executives' involvement in shaping IT strategy.