Security requires eternal vigilance, regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley demand attention and pop-tech culture—think Facebook, Google, iPhone—serves as a public R&D lab. But CIOs have three long-term and never-ending agendas: The now-dominant improvement agenda concentrates on building better processes and services. The innovation agenda aims at creating high-potential technologies and ways to use them. But when the economic outlook becomes stormier or new technologies present a fresh chance to save money, the third agenda—the cost-reduction agenda—rises like a flooding creek.

That's what will happen in 2008. Uncertain at best, stormy at worst, the economy will pressure large companies in particular to reduce IT and other costs. Organizations will exploit their recent investments in the Internet, services-based architectures and data analysis to improve services and processes, but how aggressively depends on how much the economy and the availability of IT talent in the U.S. and abroad shuts down the pipeline.

CIO Insight surveyed more than 250 IT executives on their expectations for 2008. What follows is a summary of 20 trends for the coming year and beyond. It combines new CIO Insight research with important findings from studies conducted in the past 12 months.

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