8. Business activity monitoring will be mainstream by 2007.

In the future, information systems will provide the relevant facts to people at the relevant time. Cynics might well ask what information systems provided in the past if not that? But Baty believes only now are information and communication networks sufficiently sophisticated and meshed with business needs that they can support improved decision-making. Any organisation that harbours ambitions to become a real-time enterprise will fundamentally require such systems, he says. These systems will ensure that complex decisions are routed to the most appropriate person, with less complex decisions being "made" by the systems themselves, which will further speed processes.

To support this, business activity monitoring will provide the facts and context to the people who actually make the decisions when they need to make a decision. While agreeing that at one level such applications offer managers a basic digital dashboard, helping them to steer a course, the overlay of business policies and rules on the raw information will allow more effective decision-making, Baty says.

Gartner Action Item: Re-evaluate the delegation of decisions based on systems capability based on business activity monitoring.

9. Business units not IT will make most application decisions.

"The clever CIO will work with the business unit", Baty says, rather than abrogate decision-making as this trend takes hold. However, Gartner sees as inevitable business units having far more say and sway over IT application decisions in the future. In part a backlash from the business against high spending associated with Y2K and the dotcom boom, there are some clear advantages from having business more involved in IT decision-making.

But Baty warns that the shift needs careful handling, because "organisations will move from a monarchy to an anarchy if they are not careful. You need autonomy at the business level, but within a framework." He suggests that the best frameworks will be constructed by a troika comprising the CEO, CFO and CIO, which will help establish the governance required to ensure that the IT systems deliver value to the organisation.

According to Baty, it's a question of balance. "As IT decisions move outward to the business departments, they will often be less optimal overall than the centrally-planned decisions previously made by IT. On the other hand, to the extent that the increased responsiveness allows the business departments to succeed more strongly, the overall value to the enterprise should outweigh the redundancies and lessened scale advantage," he says.

One consequence of this more devolved approach to information systems will be the requirement that enterprises re-examine how they assess return on investment in IT. For example, once business decides which IT applications it wants to invest in, it will probably have to weigh that investment against other business-related investments. Should it invest in a new CRM system or a TV advertising campaign? Which offers more value? It will be a significant shift away from an IT-centric value analysis where the value of the new CRM system might be pitted against the value proposition of replacing legacy servers with new machines.

Gartner Action Item #1: IT groups can represent overall efficiency in the decision process made by business leaders to lobby for the best balance between cost efficiency and business agility.

Gartner Action Item #2: Develop a formal portfolio approach to applications and IT initiatives.

1.0 The pendulum will swing back from centralised to decentralised by 2004.

This shift is already under way among the largest corporations, according to Gartner, which says that next year about a third of all enterprises with revenues greater than $US1 billion will have begun the shift back to decentralised IT systems. Baty believes it is important to get a head start as the more competitive business climate anticipated by 2004 will demand increased agility from enterprises; an agility spurred by less reliance on monolithic computer systems.

Although Baty acknowledges a still-seductive argument for centralised computing is the economies of scale it can offer, he believes that the requirement for greater agility in the future will spur companies to re-examine decentralising their information systems. And that move, he says, will be aided by the fact that in the future bandwidth will become more cost-effective than computing. The challenge for CIOs will be to balance the need for economy with the requirement for corporate agility.

Gartner Action Item: Be sure to balance organisational objective for decentralisation against the economic advantages of consolidation and centralisation.