Originally, I thought I?d end the year with my predictions of what next year held for IT. Apparently, predicting the future direction of technology is easy; just read the pronouncements from vendors, bloggers, and the press.

In the real world, however, the problem is deciding on which technology you should be focusing your IT dollars, a process that quickly becomes a balancing act between business goals and IT capabilities. The push to normalize IT -- in other words, to treat it like any other business unit -- means IT must also prove its short-term business value. Unfortunately, this effort limits what IT can really do, as my friend Dan Kusnetzky at IDC points out.

With that constraint in mind, I thought that for the last column of this year I would look at what IT?s business partners want and the technology that delivers it.

Wallet share: This phrase is being heard in the executive washroom with increasing frequency. It means, ?It costs too much to find new customers, so let?s milk the old ones for every cent they?ve got.? Two IT trends are emerging to help companies gain wallet share: customer data hubs and the integration of BI with CRM.

The customer hub concept means transitioning from separate silos of customer information to a single repository. The other trend is to take that single source of data and run it against predictive analytics, for example. Predicting customer behavior is a sure way to sell a lot more products.

Staying out of jail: Sarbanes-Oxley will push accountability down the org chart. In turn, far more employees will need dashboards and business activity monitoring tools to keep track of key performance indicators for their parts of the world.

Reducing IT spending: Minimizing the number of platforms companies have to support has always been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. TCP/IP all the time, every time, will someday be the answer. VoIP is an interesting step in that direction.

Cutting costs: Companies are looking carefully at everything they are doing and are asking, ?Could someone else do it better than we can?? Hosted and managed applications, as well as offshoring, are becoming more enticing than ever.

Increasing efficiency: There?s a real fight between businesspeople who are eyeing wireless as a way to gain extra productivity and those in IT who are reluctant to support yet another new technology.

The benefits of wireless are real. It is, in the words of my friend Tony Meadow at Bear River Associates, ?the last frontier of computerization.?

IDC?s Kusnetzky counters, saying, ?Don?t do anything until people are screaming at you.? Unfortunately, when it comes to wireless, next year they may well be doing that.

One version of the truth: In logistics, this means total visibility into your supply chain. In CRM, it?s about being a customer-centric company. In ERP, it?s about automating the reconciliation process.

Data integration is the perennial solution to all these issues, and it cuts down on errors and redundancy while reducing the cost of data entry and validation. Today you can integrate without moving any data using portals and middleware.

So as you can see, I have no fearless forecast for the future of technology. In fact, I don?t see much point in making any forecasts at all. The bigger question you?ll have to answer for yourself is, What?s in your IT wallet?