Assertion: After finally experiencing the law of diminishing returns on efficiency improvements, many companies are now placing innovation as a top priority. Innovation requires a different environment and a different culture; most companies will require an extreme makeover in order to be successful.

Collaboration is as essential to business operations as competition, if not more so. When groups of people bring their ideas and skills together to contribute to a single project, powerful synergies can emerge to create better ideas, better plans, and better projects. Today, as organizations increasingly focus on their core competencies, collaboration is becoming ever more important. Why? Because organizations must work with both their outsourced services suppliers and their supply chain in order to remain in business. At the same time, companies often work with other companies in joint ventures, networks, and in support of standards that aid the whole industry.

Web 2.0 has become kind of a metatag to describe a number of evolving features and capabilities of the protean Internet. One of the most pronounced advancements is the software-as-services trend demonstrated most vividly by Google. What near-term implications does this trend bode for the enterprise?

Steve Andriole argues in this Summit 2005 keynote that the business technology world of the early 21st century will bear no resemblance to the past 10 years -- or even the past five years. We won't buy hardware or software the same way, we won't build it the same way, and we won't transact business the same way: everything will change. Are we prepared? Are we buying the right things? Are we teaching the right things? At this point in the transition from then to now and beyond, we're clearly not: many of us are pretending that the changes occurring today are evolutionary. They are not. When we wake up in a few years, everything will be different ... radically different. Now is the time to completely redefine the business technology relationship.