To shepherd in the New Year I’ve created a list of 15 corporate IT trends for 2015. They’re in no particular order, and most are not new – they’re just more relevant in 2015 given the long lead time for mass corporate adoption of new technologies, practices, and thinking…

1. Increased automation. There’s no escaping that people costs continue to be a big part of total IT costs. 2015 will see even greater automation adoption by corporate IT organizations under pressure to reduce costs and better demonstrate business value.
    
2. Continued cloud adoption. Security will continue to be a cause for concern but integrations and always-up service availability will rise to be two very practical concerns for enterprise cloud adoption. Organizations will also need to continue to seek out people with the ability to manage suppliers and service delivery.
    
3. The growth of hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud, defined by global analyst firm Gartner as “a combination of private, public, and community cloud services,” will continue to rise in popularity during 2015 as organizations look to get the best from both private and public cloud.
    
4. The BYO epiphany. Corporate IT will finally wake up to see that Shadow IT and BYO-anything are not being driven by consumer IT and cloud service providers but by the corporate IT organization’s inability to meet stakeholder and user expectations across usability, cost, service, and agility. Corporate IT organizations need to change; and change quickly.
    
5. Greater focus on IT costs. IT is a large and growing annual business expense. The increased use of third-party service providers will reduce the burden somewhat but it will not be enough for IT organizations to escape the scrutiny of the CFO and CEO, and the need for greater financial stewardship in 2015.
    
6. The increased focus on costs will drive a focus on assets. The lack of business scrutiny over IT costs has allowed many IT organizations to be lackadaisical in their asset management. In 2015 corporate IT organizations will finally look closely at physical and software asset use to reduce and optimize costs.
    
7. IT service management models will potentially trifurcate. Consumerization and the extension of IT service management (ITSM) capabilities to enterprise service management, will cause ITSM as a discipline to divide into two different schools of thinking. There will be traditional ITSM, enterprise service management, and then both with an emphasis on better meeting customer expectations.
    
8. The need to manage more complex IT supplier environments. Initially as large enterprises exit outsourcing deals that have failed to deliver against expectations of service improvement, cost savings, and innovation. But smaller organizations will also need to seamlessly manage portfolios of third-party, often cloud service, providers.
    
9. Continued mobile pervasiveness. Not only will this dictate the need for better service and app design and delivery, and more intelligent approaches to BYOD, but also the need to better consider the security implications of mobility such as data segregation issues.
    
10. Wearables and the quantified worker. The Apple iWatch launch will no doubt increase the focus on wearable computing and the business use cases. It’s an exciting technology opportunity, but the IT organization and its business partners will need to fully understand the human implications of the new technology.
11. Big Data. While there will continue to be big talk about Big Data, the real Big Data issue for 2015 will be the availability of Big Data people and their Big Data skills rather than Big Data technology itself.
     
12. The Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of Everything (IoE). 2015 will see IT organizations having to look beyond the traditional IT capabilities, such as availability and capacity management, to work closer with business colleagues on how these now-connected devices do, can, and will tie in to business operations and business models.
     
13. Knowledge management will reappear. Not only because of the replacement of people with automation but also due to the rise in self-help and self-service. Organizations need to be clear about what they need though – knowledge isn’t valuable because it is managed, the value comes from its use and reuse.
     
14. Software-defined everything will continue its advancement. Software-defined servers now seem old hat; software-defined networking continues to mature; and software-defined storage is gaining interest. It’s about increasing your agility, minimizing vendor lock-in, and improving your ability to serve the customers and consumers of your IT services.
     
15. Unicorn chasing will continue. Whether it’s cloud operations or DevOps thinking, enterprise IT will continue its fascination with technology giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Although I’m not sure that 2015, 2016, or even 2017 for that matter will be the year that they are caught.

So that’s my 15 trends – what would you have included in, or omitted from, the list?