Heads up: here comes your next IT challenge.

• Author: Gray, Carol Lippert
• Position: Information technology

Enabling computer networks to triangulate the euro was the 800-pound information technology gorilla that sat on the 1998 calendars of many organizations. And the millennium bug is still crawling across some 1999 agendas. But, since there's always something new barreling down the IT pike, what's the next blip to look for on your radar screen?

Dorothy Hayes, director of internal audit at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif. (and recently dubbed as project manager for the HP business-unit split), foresees three blips: "knowledge management, the whole Internet space and electronic commerce," including security. And that overview neatly packages the answers from all the experts with whom Financial Executive spoke.

It's All In Your Head

"Extracting knowledge from systems, databases and warehouses" is first on Hayes' list because, she says, organizations have spent huge amounts of money creating these infrastructures. Now they must learn to use them.

Scott Shemwell, director of the oil and gas industry sector at MCI Systemhouse in Houston and leader of its Y2K-preparedness initiative, calls this "separating the hype from the reality." He says, "You have to understand your business and how technology can be deployed." But, he cautions, "You also have to understand the limitations of technology and the management of technology, as opposed to the management of the business."

Thus, says Daniel Burrus, the author of Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition and founder and CEO of Burrus Research Associates in Milwaukee, you must change the way you plan. "Strategic planning is financial planning in disguise in most companies, and that's a valid late-'90s approach," he explains. "But strategic planning requires far more. You need to de-commoditize your company's products and services; create a uniqueness that distances you from the competition; and try to capture mind share rather than market share."

He defines de-commoditizing as going from exclusively price-based strategies to "new ways to make your products and services distinct and to generate value, competing on the basis of company values, innovation, customer experience, reputation and service." He says mind share is "how long it takes your firm's name to come to the customer's mind."

"Most of the technology in organizations today is underutilized," Burrus thinks. "The 21st century CFO uses technology tools to redefine the marketplace and redefine growth in revolutionary...