Tuning TECH to Business - ' Developing IT strategies and '

Developing IT strategies and capabilities that provide competitive advantage ranked second on the list of most challenging future IT issues. IT organizations must be visionary and innovative, yet sweat the smallest technical and process details at the same time. And to top it off, they are expected to keep all their systems up and running with five-nines availability.

IT executives and managers cite maintaining IT security and privacy as the most difficult long-term management problem they face. It's not just staying ahead of the hackers' technical advances and ingenuity that's hard, nor the difficulty of preventing end users from exercising careless, risky behavior. New security challenges—the impact of social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, for example—keep coming.

The next generation of information workers is conditioned to openly share information through their peer networks, and many IT and security managers are struggling to comprehend what social networking means to data protection and leakage prevention. Enterprises are already grappling with the issue of whether to embrace or disregard the social networking wave, and some have discovered that they can't stop social networking because employees will revolt. Social networking, it seems, will add another dimension to the business alignment challenge.