That’s it; the final issue of 2006 is safely tucked up in bed, and as the editorial team of IT Week drag themselves over the finishing line, the time has come once again to make some predictions for the year ahead. My first is a somewhat disturbing piece of news; it seems that over the course of this week, certain members of the team, let’s say, senior members who should frankly know better, have hatched a plot to destroy the good reputation of this magazine.

It was decided during the final podcast of this year that we should record the Lou Reed/David Bowie classic Perfect Day, recently cringingly covered in a BBC advert. Now it may drive traffic to the web site and create a “buzz”, but to be perfectly honest, I think most of us were hired for our journalistic skills or tecchie know-how, not our singing voices. And for “buzz” you could probably substitute “humiliation on a never-before seen scale”. However, we are as ever your humble servants, so if there are any requests, you know where the comments box is…

More mundanely, as 2007 approaches, it seems there is compliance trouble at mill for many enterprises, who are struggling to meet increasingly stringent demands without the appropriately skilled security staff. More demand for key skills in this area and The Training Camp has already predicted it sees security as a top training priority for next year, displacing software development.