Bangalore: The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) at the end of 2009 published a five-year outlook “The Future of Corporate IT” a forecast about fundamental changes in IT predicting of  a series of radical shifts around IT's value, ownership, and role. According to the CEBs five year outlook, predictions were that  IT would focus more on data analysis and less on process improvement, push rapidly into the cloud, cede more ownership of technology investments to business units, and transition to a services model writes Shvetank Shah, Executive Director of CEB to  InformationWeek.

However just two years after these predictions, it seems like the transformations are occurring even faster than expected. Below listed are four key areas where IT leaders need to be prepared  for evolving changes.

1. The Cloud

CEB study reveals that 20 percent of IT companies are already doing the cloud business in a big way and the growth rate is expected to shoot up through 2013. As more companies are counting on the cloud computing resources for their IT requirements.

The five areas where IT leaders' contribution is most needed to accelerate public cloud readiness are in addressing service-level agreements, security governance, performance, billing models, and legal issues reports InformationWeek.

Things to look at: IT leaders when considering cloud services--private and public need to start with the end in mind. Features such as faster provisioning, usage-based billing, and assurances of security and compliance matter more to your business-unit colleagues than the technical architecture.