Addressing delegates at the WCIT 2002, IBM GSA's senior vice president Doug Elix commented on the increasing tendancy of senior management staff to take a role in IT purchasing decisions within corporations around the world.

-Five years ago, business unit executives were involved in only 32 percent of all IT buying decisions, today they are involved in about 43 percent," he pronounced. -In two years we believe they will be influential in nearly six out of every ten IT buying decisions."

Using these figures to emphasise his point, Elix asserted the need for business executives to become highly IT literate.

-IT expertise should be viewed the same as any other core skill required to run a business," Elix said.

Elix went on to discuss the promises of grid computing, and the extent to which the ability to pool processing power would lead increases in productivity.

-Governments are starting to build national grids. In the UK, the Office of Science and Technology is building a national Grid that will connect with research centers in Southhamton, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Belfast, Oxford and others," Elix said. -Eventually, the government intends to make the grid available to the private sector so organisations can access it as a super computing utility."

In regards to IT outsourcing, IBM GSA's core business, Elix said a change in the general business climate had forced outsourcing to again focus on issues surrounding return on investment, rather than transformational outsourcing.

-When outsourcing started the principal concern was the bottom line, then we gradually saw a shift towards a tendency to use outsourcing as a method to transform a company's operations," Elix said. -In recent times we have seen the pendulum swing back the other way to more of a focus on costs of implementation."

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