what is the future of IT?

While changes in the employment landscape are declining in all industries, IT continues to outperform the general marketplace. Following are some facts that might help shape the future of IT.

• Topping the list of eweek.com's top five tech trends is cloud computing. Over the next three years, we’ll see cloud computing continue to expand. Because cloud computing allows a large number of networked computer systems to share an IT infrastructure, operating “in the cloud” frees small business owners previously limited by the capabilities of local or remote computers, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/.
• Computer Economics predicts that base salaries for IT management and for people in application development functions will creep up between two and three percent this year, as certain programming and IT architecture skills remain in high demand and as employers offset reductions in bonuses for managers with higher base salaries, http://www.cio.com/article/.
• How do IT professionals feel about President Obama’s efforts to establish a Chief Technology Officer at the White House? Of the 853 business technology professionals surveyed by InformationWeek Analytics, 80% said there’s a definite need. At the same time, 17% say a federal CTO is not needed, http://informationweekanalytics.com/.
• According the Department of Health and Human Services and the American Health Information Management Association, digitizing health information could save as much as $300 billion in unnecessary expenses being paid for the wrong treatments. In addition, RAND Health, a nonprofit research organization, estimated that implementing health information systems in 90 percent of hospitals and doctors' offices would cost about $8 billion per year over 15 years; savings from efficiency and health benefits could be $81 billion to $161 billion or more per year, http://www.itic.org/.
• One market faring satisfactorily in the recession is managed services. As corporate IT staffing gets squeezed, more firms will find the purchase of third-party managed services a cost-effective alternative to hiring more workers. That's the finding of a report from Insight Research Corp. Insight predicts managed services revenue to grow from nearly $30 billion in 2008 to nearly $43 billion in 2013. Carriers, service providers, IT equipment vendors, systems integrators and specialist firms all stand to benefit, http://napps.networkworld.com/.
• Dice Holdings Inc., which operates the Dice online job site, noted that it currently has about 57,000 job listings, down 35% from the same time last year, http://www.networkworld.com/.
• NetApp, Edward Jones, Boston Consulting Group, Google, and Wegman’s Food Market made the top five in Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work for, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/.
• Market researcher ComScore reported that LinkedIn’s unique visitors rose to 7.7 million, a 22 percent increase over December. Total minutes spent on the site also more than doubled from December to 96.8 million, according to TechCrunch, http://www.techcrunch.com/.