2009 could be the year that a number of big organisations make a success of Agile. This will be because - at the right level in those companies - there will be people who fundamentally understand the principles, have had experience applying them, and (here’s the nub) are effective, inspirational, persuasive leaders. Pushing agile out beyond development teams and single projects is organisational change, and this doesn’t succeed without clear need and great - visible - leadership.* The clear need is provided by the turmoil in the world of business and finance: companies that get this right will survive strengthened, those that don’t will perish or at best stagger through.

I’m also still excited about (on the one hand) client application environments like Flex/AIR and XUL/XULRunner and (on the other) cloud computing. There’s a startling new architecture out there waiting for its killer applications.

*Such leadership is a rare commodity in any industry, but seems to be particularly so in IT. The corollary of this, of course, is that there will be plenty of firms who try it by the book, or following some guru, and will fail. In these organisations, agile will get the blame, and they’ll end up in a confused no-mans-land where development teams are doing agile development, management teams are still looking for milestones, project budgets and commitments, and product managers are talking to customers and markets at the expense of taking real responsibility for their products.