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Far from being very happy, year 2006 is going to be a big challenge

I was responding to Happy New Year calls and SMSs with the standard 'same to you' reply when I realized that the year 2006 might not be really a very happy New Year. I tried doing a bit of crystal ball gazing and whatever little I could foresee was not something, which I can call very happy.

Let me start with the CIO, the prime reader of this magazine. I can bet that the CIO's work is going to get even more demanding and challenging in 2006.  The pressure from functional heads, who now know about IT and want better and efficient solutions, is going to increase like never before. The vendors will try and bypass the CIO and negotiate directly with the functional heads. Similarly, his CEO will ask much tougher questions and will be more worried about the IT applications and infrastructure than in the past. For a lot of problems, all the blame will come to the CIO. In this context, I do not see the year 2006 being very happy for the CIO.

Taking this forward, I am not sure that the new year will bring in a lot more cheer to vendors. While the domestic market will continue to grow and expand, selling will become tougher. Competition will increase. Prices will keep dropping, margins will continue to get thin, but enterprise user expectations from their vendors will continue to increase. It might not be such a happy 2006 for the vendors, whether hardware, software, or solutions.

For the majority of software engineers and specialists whose fortunes changed as they got an opportunity to go to the US, Europe and many other flourishing parts of the world, to work and earn good money and experience, overseas assignments might become difficult. Thanks to the sinking feeling about loosing jobs, and the increasing paranoia from terrorism, the preferred option will be off-shoring rather than onsite. To those engineers who were planning to work and eventually settle down abroad, it is not going to be so easy in 2006 and beyond.

Even as we talk of e-Governance, I am pained at the level of knowledge and the interest most bureaucrats have about Information Technology. Most of the civil servants and politicians that I come across are completely at a loss when it comes to using IT. They are role models in many ways, but do not even know how to check mails. They have not put any system in place to respond to emails, even though they have an email ID and websites. Whatever few e-Governance champions exist, are not given any special encouragement or growth path. I do not see anything new for them as far as 2006 is concerned.

Personally for me, as a journalist, the year 2006 is going to be very hectic. There will be a lot more action-more news to analyze, more products to write about, comparatively many CEOs to meet, seminars and conferences to organize and attend. Even in 2006 my dream of reaching office at 1.00 in the afternoon, and then spend the rest of the day reading newspapers will remain a dream.

While I call the above mentioned situations in 2006 as something that will add to every stakeholder's challenge, let me also tell you that the winners will be those who convert them into opportunities. CIOs who quickly re-align themselves with their internal users will be acclaimed. Vendors that start seeing their customers as partners will bag a lot more deals. Software professionals with aspirations to go abroad will have to quickly try and move up the value chain, and civil servants and politicians, which adopt IT will become closer to the whole new mass of the emerging next generation.

However, as an ever optimist, let me end by saying that starting 2006, challenges will increase, but the joy of overcoming them will be much more.

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