#14 Offshore Outsourcing
What began as a cheap fix for Y2K problems has exploded into a legitimate and multifaceted industry, which must make the manager of the Bangalore Starbucks very happy. India accounts for more than 85 percent of the offshore IT outsourcing market — Oracle Corp. now has 5 percent of its workforce there — but China, Russia, Poland, Ireland, and other countries are also happy to provide IT brainpower for only 60 percent to 70 percent of what U.S. workers earn. At a time when demand for traditional technology outsourcing is flattening, the offshore variety is predicted to grow to more than $17 billion by 2005 (and that's spending by U.S. companies alone), and account for up to 28 percent of the IT budgets of companies that take this approach. Already, though, IT salaries are climbing in India; analysts say "mundane" coding will move to China and other nations eager to emerge digitally.
#15 Portals
The profound impact of the Internet is not limited to the connectivity it affords. Its other hallmark, an easy-to-use browser interface, has given rise to portals, those one-stop shops for the harried knowledge worker that place reams of information and an endless number of functions just a mouse-click away. Whether it's a Web-based resource such as (to cite one example) cfo.com, a company intranet, a software-company site, or any number of other manifestations, portals have emerged as the dominant way to organize and access Web-based information. This "single-entry computing" should simplify life in the finance department as major ERP companies prepare to come to market with function-specific portals. B2B portals may succeed where online exchanges failed, uniting partners in shared Web spaces.
#16 Privacy
Descriptions of a company's privacy policy have become a junk-mail staple, but hashing out just what will and won't be done with the data at a company's disposal is serious business. As the Online Personal Privacy Act makes its way through Congress, businesses will have to think carefully about the privacy rights of customers, employees, and other constituencies. In recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, took companies to task for a number of perceived abuses. New Federal Trade Commission chairman Timothy Muris favors more-stringent enforcement of existing laws rather than new legislation, but either way, companies are likely to feel increasing pressure to treat personal information as something other than a commodity. The matter is further complicated by efforts to crack down on cybercrime, since many proposed solutions are seen by some as violating the right to privacy.
#17 Security
Robert Morris, Kevin Mitnick, the Masters of Deception: computing has given us almost as many colorful "villains" as billionaire heroes. Unfortunately, these days one doesn't have to be terribly bright to be a hacker, and that particular form of equal opportunity has companies plenty worried. Spending on computer security remained strong at the end of last year and the beginning of 2002, but took a dip recently as several major vendors said they'd miss earnings targets. Analysts and venture-capital gurus remain bullish on security, but say that the old scare tactics no longer move the merchandise. Today, corporate customers are buying security software and services only if they're accompanied by the ultimate security blanket: verifiable ROI. Hackers might do well to reevaluate their own ROI: David Smith just got 20 months in jail for creating the Melissa virus.
#18 ROI
With IT budgets in outright decline for the first time ever, companies can't afford to make mistakes. So the financial calipers are being dusted off as technology buyers try (once again) to assess the hard-dollar outcomes of their IT bets. Those companies that sell technology are attempting to meet buyers more than halfway, offering all kinds of calculators, white papers, third-party endorsements, and the like. Miraculously, these measures indicate that every technology for sale today provides irrefutable payback. Enter the CFO, who knows a thing or two about ROI analysis and who, post-Enron, may be happy to school CIOs on the differences between internal rate of return and discounted cash flow. Could this be the rekindling of a beautiful friendship between IT and finance, or a passing flirtation that fades with the rising Dow?
#19 Mobility
Numbering almost 80 million and growing: such is the state of the American mobile workforce today. Telecommuters, multisite workers, and the prototypical traveling salesman make up most of that number, and if they work for large companies, then about 75 percent of those mobile workers have access to E-mail and corporate applications. Keeping that mobile workforce productive doesn't come cheap, though, and with more than half of the entire workforce going mobile at some point this year (although perhaps not often enough to qualify as truly mobile workers), companies will need to make more of their systems Web-accessible. The growth of the mobile workforce will force C-level executives to address information flow, performance measurement, and a host of other issues. All this as they try to retrieve a phone number from a PDA in one hand while making a cell-phone call with the other. No one said managing technology is easy.
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