Clients often ask us how we choose the projects that we do. While we obviously talk to our clients all the time about what they would like to see, the trick for us is to integrate this input into a directed initiative that advances our overall research goal. In this month's commentary, I will briefly revisit this overall goal and explain how it has led to the topics we will be exploring in 2011.

For many years, our research starting point has been that in large organizations today business and IT are becoming increasingly inseparable. They are co-evolving in ways that are significantly changing the nature and behaviour of what were once two largely separate realms. The goal of our research is to understand the business, technology and cultural implications of this ever-expanding intersection. By focusing on leading-edge developments, we seek to anticipate the emerging next practices that will be industry best practices in the years ahead. While this goal is straightforward enough, as far as we know we are the only research firm with this as an exclusive focus.

Clients will recognize the figure below as our standard way of presenting and organizing LEF research. By working within this domain structure, we can develop specific practices that are still part of an integrated research mission. While the focus of each research domain is largely self-explanatory, we like to stress that our domains are not so much separate subject areas, but rather different lenses through which to view the changing intersection between business and IT – business change; the business/IT relationship; the employee/consumerization perspective; the IT organization itself; and the changing way work itself gets done. While business sustainability may initially seem to be a bit of an outlier in this regard, we see it as an unusually clear example of an integrated business and IT challenge that will eventually confront nearly every organization.

Within this structure, the specific thinking behind each of this year's projects is presented below:

The Next Wave of Digital Game-Changers. The pace of technology change is clearly accelerating, but the bulk of the next wave of IT developments will arise outside of the traditional Enterprise IT mandate. Combined with the recent recession, this has made it hard for many firms to keep emerging technology as a front-of-mind issue. This report will highlight the 25 to 30 most promising areas of significant business/IT change, including: Post-PC Architectures, Bring Your Own Technology programmes, Wireless Broadband, Mobile Payment systems, Collaborative Consumption, Biometrics and Facial Recognition, Identity and Privacy 2.0, Semantic Web, Internet TV, Advertising in the Enterprise, the Location-Aware Web, and many others. The report will be written for a business audience interested in upcoming technology-driven opportunities and challenges. I will be the principal author for this project.

Repositioning IT for Greater Business Value. While the need for IT to create more business value has been stressed for literally decades, a new consensus approach is now emerging. Through a combination of virtualization, consumerization and strategic sourcing, companies must reduce their back-office focus so they can keep up with the explosion of technology at the front of the company: smart products, mobility, collaboration, internet marketing, social media, analytics, etc. While doing this is still much easier said than done, forward-thinking organizations now see this as an essential future requirement, and are acting accordingly. Understanding where firms are in this long but necessary journey is now a major LEF research priority and will be the main theme of our upcoming US and European executive forums. This report will be written primarily for our CIO and senior IT leadership team audience. Kirt Mead, Alex Mayall and Richard Davies are the project team.

Preparing for a Post-PC World. The explosion of interest in smart phones (iPhones, Androids, Blackberries) and so-called ‘tablets' (iPad, Samsung Galaxy, etc.) has suddenly made the traditional desktop/laptop computer seem a bit clunky, even old-fashioned. 2011 will be the year that these truly mobile products become pervasive across the enterprise, and thus Enterprise IT must find ways to embrace this change so that it does not wind up on the wrong side of history. This will require significant changes in procurement, vendor management, employee support, security policies and legal compliance, all of which are part of the accelerating consumerization of information technology. Preparing for this Post-PC World will also be the theme of the 2011 LEF Study Tour. Our goal is to help clients position themselves for the many changes that are surely ahead. Doug Neal will be the project leader.

A Lifecycle Approach to Cloud Computing. Just about every organization faces a common dilemma. They must be as efficient as possible to compete in today's market, but they also must be agile and innovative to successfully compete in the future. The problem is that efficiency and agility often require diametrically opposed management methods and cultures. As cloud computing is often simultaneously promoted on both efficiency and agility grounds, it provides a fascinating lens through which to see how companies are managing this tension within business and IT today. Our starting premise is that the business challenge is not so much about efficiency and innovation per se, but how companies manage the path and lifecycle between the two. We think some of the large dot.coms (especially Google, Amazon and Salesforce) are particularly worthy of study in this regard. This research is being led by Simon Wardley.

Transparency in the Age of Wikileaks. For more than a decade, pundits have been describing the potential benefits of ‘radical transparency' – the practice of making almost everything about a company publicly available, including product plans, sales figures, employee salaries, even the CEO's personal blog. Such transparency could re-energize public relations, marketing, sales, human resources (particularly recruiting), research and development, the IT department, employee awareness and much more. But of course, there are also many potential pitfalls, and most firms today are still very much in an information lock-down mode. The Wikileaks controversy makes this a particularly good time to assess how companies, government agencies and non-profit institutions that have embraced ‘radical transparency' have fared – and what lessons this might have for the rest of us. This project will be led by Michael Nelson, the newest member of the LEF research team.

Sustainability and the Role of IT. This project is still being designed, but we plan to look at firms broadly recognized as being sustainability leaders in their respective industries. We will then interview these firms to determine the role of IT in terms of each firm's sustainability strategy. Potential areas of IT contribution include: smart products, energy efficiency, tracking dangerous substances, demand and supply-side analysis, recycling, measurement and compliance. We expect to announce the project team for this initiative over the next couple of months.

Other projects

In addition to the projects described above, over the next few months we will be experimenting with alternative media formats. Towards this end, clients will soon receive a video version of Simon Wardley's very popular cloud lifecycle presentation, as well as a deck of playing cards that can be used for Business/IT Relationship Management exercises. The report on Brinley Platts' 2010 project on how information technology and particularly social media are reshaping the employee of the future is reaching its final stages. Finally, we will announce at least one additional project during the first half of 2011. More details on all of these projects are available at www.lef.csc.com. Taken together, they define the areas where we seek to work with clients over the year ahead.