Yes, IT is fast approaching the realm of being a boring topic to business leaders - but in the sense of "IT as a bunch of technology that can enable things" - as a "means to an end." CRM, SOA, whatever. It is becoming the "engine room." Boring.

But what is exciting is what that ultimate target might be. That is enabled by IT but is clearly different. It is in fact the revolutionary capability to put information out there, and to be able to sort through, collect and use that information.

I think IBM has it right. The result is dramatic changes in business structures and dramatic changes in the idea of collaboration and sharing with unimaginable communities as sources of ideas.

Did you see the recent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Prosper? Phenomenal. This is a Web site (prosper.com) that is connecting individuals who want to borrow money with those who want to lend it. The borrower makes a request with justifications and qualifications, and prospective loaners bid to take the loan at a specified interest rate - all via the Web. Once agreed on, the deal is done, without the enormous structure of Citigroup, Visa, etc. Prosper gets a 1 percent fee (and does the payment processing), the borrower gets a much lower interest rate than 18 percent, and the loaner gets much more than the 4 percent a money market fund might yield. The key here is a whole new structure of business; it's a radical idea. That's not to say that Prosper will or won't be successful, but what an idea.

The other example we heard about at one of our internal research meetings recently was in the healthcare industry. It dealt with the emergence of the "infomediary," who can bring together all the relevant information about your healthcare: conditions, symptoms, sources, patterns, costs, locations, treatments, insurance, physicians, et al. This is a new approach - and enabled by the access of this incredible amount of information - but structured or accessed in a way that is actually useful. Again, remarkable.

Given this access, all kinds of people get involved and "discover gold" from unimaginable sources - via sharing a bit of information. Why not get more than half your ideas from external sources?

So, this is the type of message that business will be picking up in a big way as we move forward. Does IT have a lot to do with the understanding and acceptance of this concept? I very much doubt it. It will merely repeat the history of not being the source either.

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I agree, IT and any new buzz that goes along with it is completley boring. This seems to be really evident with it comes to the ECM (enterprise content management and portal realm). In the sea of vendors offering tired buzzwords and no more wow...there is in fact one technology that takes a novel and unique approach.

Centralpoint, by Oxcyon takes SOA to a whole new level, able to remotely update across disparate environments from one central web feed. Think VMWare (virtualization) meets CMS/ECM. This approach allows for market ready best practices to be replicated (in minutes not months) to anyone who needs a complete soluion. Best of all, the ability to remotely update and re-distribute new tools in direct response to client demands VOC (Voice of Customer) makes it organic. Oxcyon has enjoyed early market adoption in Publishing, Healthcare, Manufacturing and even Non profit organizations. Centralpoint gives oxcyon the ability to deliver a working solution during the first visit with the client in contrast to 'boring' white board diagrams traditionally following an RFI or RFP. This 'Proof of Principle' approach, not only eliminates all of the guessing, but reduces risk in the client's decision....providing immediate results. Say goodbye to the vendors promising 'simulators'.

This patent pending approach entitled Horizontal propagation allows for the replication and updating of modular based technologies....completely eliminating development version control, and empowering immediate reactions to market demands and conditions which just keep changing faster.

IT and ECM is still pretty boring, but if you look to the smaller technology vendors, you will see some interesting, fun...if not absolutely revolutionary. What is boring are the same majors talking concept without any real change to the product and deliverable.

I am not sure what do you mean by boring. If you mean stable or risk exempt, I do not agree. If you mean not maturing, problem reiteration, old situations rediscovery I could agree.
I have been working in IT since 1972 and my perception is an industry in continous change that never reaches maturity (or will?), however in the last years I am perceiving a serious effort on standardization. Still today running a complex/major application development project is a major adventure with the budget and the schedule, and in some cases with the quality of the product.
And do not forget, many new succesful business rely on an invention in some way connected to IT. This is the case of the major Insurance Company Direct Line (UK), where I worked for some time. See also how much of Google succes is due to its PageRank algorithm (an IT PhD work in Stanford).

IT perhaps epitomizes what one may call the 'Extreme tendency' pattern in relation to how we perceive technologies. To explain this in the case of IT, there was huge exuberance in the days leading up to the dot com boom - IT would transform business irretrievably and unrecognizably, dot-com companies would consign regular companies to the dust heap, etc. Within a scant few years, we hear talk of the 'end of IT', and what a bore IT is becoming, etc.

Lest we think that this 'extreme tendency' is either new or unique to how we perceive IT, it may be reassuring (!) to know that this is a repeated pattern dating back at least a century, and characterizes how we perceive the technology of the day. In this pattern, upcoming technologies are accorded a status that is more extreme than is warranted by the facts. Anyone interested in pursuing this line of thinking further may want to look at a piece I have written elsewhere titled, Re-engineering the Crystal Ball (http://www.computerworld.co...).

Whether boring or not, IT appears certain to permeate deeper into the fabric of business everywhere, and become increasingly fundamental to doing business. One can say with reasonable certainty that 5 or 10 years hence, we will still be asking the same question, only not with IT in a generic sense but with more specific technologies - perhaps, social computing or nanotechnology?!

I have seen the Centralpoint product by Oxcyon through a web based demonstration. Our organizatio does not use the product, but found it extremely interesting. Our team has evaluated numerous ECM/CMS technologies, but have never seen anything like this one. It introduces what I would call a Lifecycle Management approach to ECM/CMS, which completely eliminates traditional version control over website management. The ability to synchronize new features downstream to disparate websites was intriquing, but the ability to synchronize 'across' disparate environments made it very unique. I agree that the term 'boring' would be out of order, rather would suggest uninspired, or static.

'Virtualization' has been seen in a variety of verticals to include server maintenance (EMC) and even online gaming media/entertainment, but am encouraged to see it in othe spaces like Enterprise Content management as it could actually validate many a failed ebusiness, based on the economics of the development vs. profit.

Go to http://www.pge.com/hightech to see what innovation is taking place through partnering between a utility company and technology partners and you can see new drivers to increase data center energy efficiencies. If other industries can begin to collaborate in the same manner, to create financial incentives for organizational and cultural change, we'll see more IT innovation than heretofore.