Productivity figures for developed economies in recent years clearly show that IT investment is failing to contribute as much as it used to. The easy stuff has been automated and made more efficient; now we're down to the really hard gains.

But I question how many organizations have really "done" ERP, CRM, e-business and the like. Surely, there's plenty of scope for continued enhancements and improvements. Before we move on to the "next big thing," let's make sure we've properly finished the last great thing. Nearly all our clients would probably claim that they have business intelligence tools and capabilities. But I don't know many (or any, come to think of it) that would declare that they do business intelligence really well and have exhausted all possibilities with it.

As for the next big thing, our own emerging trends and technologies research points toward the merging of the physical world with the communications and compute worlds (real world web) and the possibilities that pervasive computing can unleash in innovation. Mesh, sensor, RFID, location, presence and broadband wireless technologies will be the foundation for all sorts of business innovations. The convergence of IT with biology (biotech), IT with molecular science (nanotech) or IT with autonomous robots also offers an interesting future. And most IT remains counterintuitive and difficult to interact with; the human-computer interface is a fertile place for innovation.

And if not IT, where will business look for innovation? What competitor is out there?

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I believe this principle comes back to the "Silver Bullet" and is expressed very nicely in Gartner's Hype Cycle.

First, the Hype Cycle seems fairly accurate except there is a huge hole between the trout of disillusionment and slope of enlightment that most dreams fall through because IT thought leaders see the "silver bullet" in something further back on the cycle.

The "silver bullet" in all of this is to remember why we are in business. It is a combination of determining objectivies and employing an interative solution. Not necessarily agile or extreme programming, but realizing that your and industries ideas will mature and evolve and your implementation should be able to handle it.