• IT Strategy
• Enterprise Architecture Roadmap 
• Business Process Modeling & Analysis 
• Enterprise Software Selection 
• IT Innovation Briefings
• IT Due Diligence
• Executive IT Seminars
• Cloud Computing
• Security Maturity
• Software Process 
• Knowledge Strategy
• Technical Communities
• Knowledge Capture
• Taxonomy development 
• Enterprise Social Media 

So the Mayans had only run out of room for their calendar, and the world did not end on the winter solstice. Hence, among other things, our best wishes to you for 2013, and this new issue of The KIT.
In January, most people make resolutions, and IT consultants make predictions. In both cases, it's not always pretty when you look back at the end of the year on what you said a year earlier! But our Cutter colleagues have tried their hand at this again. Here is a sampling:

• IT strategy must be re-thought on the basis of the power of  emerging technologies like cloud computing, social business intelligence, mobility, location-enabled services and big data analytics (Stephen Andriole) 
• Many large enterprises, happy with Windows 7, will not look at adopting Windows 8 until 2014 (Mitchell Ummel)
• The recent spate of acquisitions in the collaborative tool domain will lead to some complex suites containing a poorly integrated set of features (David Coleman)
• The Lean and DevOps movements will help enterprises achieve agility with rigor, converging in the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process (Scott Ambler) 
• Customers will become more demanding of reasonable Cloud SLAs that are not as one-sided or hollow as those currently offered (Claude Baudoin)
• Complex analytics are on the rise (Brian Dooley)
• We are nearing the tipping point on the commoditization of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings (Mitchell Ummel)
• The "API economy" will emerge: companies will expose public APIs to provide more services to their partners  (Israel Gat)
• Smartphones and tablets will be adopted for enterprise use, spurring growth in mobile device management (Curt Hall) 

Go to the Cutter blog to read the complete 2013 predictions.

The Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at MIT, best known for Director Jeanne Ross's book "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy," published in Sep. 2012 a new 3-page research briefing entitled "Enterprise Architecture Is Not Just for Architects." Based on a 2011 survey of 146 enterprises, it recommends four best practices:

1. making IT costs transparent
2. debating architectural exceptions
3. performing post-implementation reviews
4. making IT investments with enterprise architecture in mind

Registration is required to download the report, but is free.

The Association for Computing Machinery's latest "hit parade" issue contains these titles, available through Safari or to subscribers to the ACM Digital Library:

• ITIL V3 Foundation Exam Video Mentor 
• Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed. 
• Designing Interfaces 
• Programming in Objective-C 2.0 LiveLessons 
• Java: How to Program, 9th Ed. 
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship 
• Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Ed.