Lisagor: My crystal ball

It appears there have been quite a few snide comments about the utter lack of credibility of my January 2004 predictions. I stand firmly behind those prognostications. And, I believe this year's projections will silence the naysayers once and for all. In 2005 ...

Paris Hilton's name will appear exactly one time in Federal Computer Week.

We will continue to debate the correct spelling of E-government, e-Government and e-Gov.

The number of veteran-owned businesses will surpass the number of uncounted votes in the last presidential election.

An unnamed industry executive will lose his personal digital assistant. A bright college student will find it. She will use competitive information stored in its memory to develop a new biometric standard. She will take her company public and become a billionaire with her own TV show.

The mismanagement of American Indian trust funds will disappear from the news.

The Government Accountability Office will initiate an investigation into shoddy budgeting practices by Congress.

The word "governance" will appear about 14 million times on the Web and in trade magazines. After a two-day session, the Office of Management and Budget will conclude that it really just means "organization" after all. A series of "organization" conferences will spring up overnight.

A top-secret government agency will lose valuable nanotechnology. A much larger replacement will be ordered.

Key members of the CIO Council will admit that they have absolutely no idea how to interpret the federal enterprise architecture and its performance model diagrams. The stock in several consulting companies will plummet until new diagrams can be developed.

The Office of Personnel Management will issue an order directing all government mobile workers to stay still.

In recognition of our continued reliance on ancient systems to protect the nation's critical infrastructure, the 2005 President's Management Agenda will include a major new initiative called "No Cobol Programmer Left Behind."

Hearing that the ultimate search engine has been repeatedly hailed as the Holy Grail of information technology, the Monty Python troupe will form a technology company to take advantage of the free publicity.

Software as a service? How about software as a deliverable?

The number of conferences dealing with wireless technology will quietly exceed the number of veteran-owned businesses.

Cast members of the Fox network's "Islands of Automation" will receive an Emmy nomination for their portrayal of government middle managers stubbornly refusing to integrate redundant systems.

Even with Get It Right, someone will still manage to get IT wrong. n

Lisagor is program chairman for the November 2005 Program Management Summit and the June 2005 WSA Business-to- Government conference in Washington state, both sponsored by FCW Events. He founded Celerity Works in 1999 to help IT executives accelerate and manage business growth. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Wash., and can be reached at lisagor@celerityworks.com.