In the fourth quarter of 2008, the current global recession began to hit quickly and hard, and the need to respond to deteriorating market conditions soon dominated the business agenda for most of our clients. Like most companies, in the middle of 2008 we at the LEF had other, more forward-thinking plans for 2009, but we soon found ourselves having to address the situation at hand.

In December 2008, we decided to substantially reshape our 2009 research agenda. Like our clients, we shifted the emphasis away from longer-term subjects, postponing or cancelling projects in areas such as strategy, architecture, globalization and Green IT. Instead, we are focusing on understanding the impact of the current recession, and then helping our community to get through it as best we can.

In the longer term, we will continue to focus on helping clients exploit the ever-growing intersection between business and IT, and we remain as committed as ever to our core research areas of business/IT co-evolution, the consumerization of IT, and the need for IT organizations to create more value for their firms. Indeed, even today’s severe market downturn has not turned clients away from these goals. As our research is showing, in some ways it is even accelerating them.

In this paper, we seek to provide a broad overview of IT’s surprisingly important – and not sufficiently recognized – role in the current recession, as well as the effects of the recession on Enterprise IT.