To deal with all this newness, to get a handle on all the possible paths and alternatives that lie before us, IT leaders would be foolish not to take advantage of the full bounty of predictions that are but a search engine keystroke away.

On Google, a search for "future predictions" generates some 25 million hits in 0.18 seconds. On MSN, a similar search produces 425,728 hits in 0.13 seconds. You are not alone in trying to figure out what comes next and what we should do next. The scope, scale and span of the questions raised by those who predict are mind-bogglingly large. A vast array of trend-watchers, influencers, style mavens, PR wonks, marketers, critics, think tanks and vendors stands ready to guide your path forward.

Every media outlet for the entire month of January can be expected to assemble competing gangs of symbolic analysts bloviating about the future. Your job is to make some sense of all this noise. Which of these prognosticators is to be believed? Which path should be followed?

As a futurist who has survived more than three decades of predicting, let me share some rules of thumb for those who would look forward:

1. The future will be a linear extrapolation of the past, unless you intervene. High- performing executives have a formalized process for collecting lessons learned from the previous year -- those wondrous chunks of "vu ja de" (things we experienced that we never want to experience again). Policies, procedures and monitoring systems are put in place to make sure that mistakes of the past aren't repeated in the future.