We are just over halfway into January. The first January of a new decade and one that promises to be an exciting, powerful and pivotal juncture in the progress of the world in general and technology in particular. And it’s that time of year again for new beginnings and a revival of both spirit and intention. We’ve all made resolutions and pledges to change or improve our lot in life, the more unrealistic of which may well have fallen by the wayside by now.

But, if we narrow the focus and just concentrate on the computing press, it's pretty obvious that the global CIO community shares similar desires, concerns and even strategies for 2010 and beyond. Our budgets may differ in value, our supported user bases may vary drastically, but in essence we plough a common furrow of business expectation and service delivery in a climate of financial constraint and global turmoil.

There is a torrent of discussion overlapping from 2009 about the cloud, optimised mobile architecture, outsourcing, SaaS, innovation, social networking and supplier management. Everybody is trying to sell us something or advising us what we should be doing, from huge struggling vendors trying to reinvent themselves in the wake of bottom line meltdown to boutique purveyors of the next best thing.

Notwithstanding all the above and more, we still face the same old challenges in terms of our legacy applications and infrastructure in ensuring we deliver and maintain technology platforms applicable to growth under the grey, leaden skies of the "New Normal"; all at a lower cost and with less headcount than last year.

So, where does curiosity come into this? Well, It's time to start asking questions. From a simple analysis and audit of software, hardware and competencies to a Socratic deconstruction of some of our most dearly held hypotheses on security, ownership, value and funding, to name a few.

The IT world as we knew it is changing, accelerating away from the internalised delivery of technical excellence and governance and opening a new wealth of opportunity for business initiated - and funded - projects that, among others, leverage "cloud" delivery of tools and services.

This can be either an entirely beneficial and supremely opportune moment for IT to step up and embed firmly within the business or signal the gradual, eroding, death of the influence and necessity for the internal Information Technology department as we know it today. It won’t happen overnight but the portents are already there with robust and compelling offerings from Google that completely trash what we knew to be true about a low cost model, to the reengineering of the Microsoft software blueprint to embrace cloud-based delivery. And that’s without Salesforce.com, Amazon EC2, S3 et al.

The concepts have been around for years but were just nibbling at the edges of universal acceptance and only the bravest, or the smallest, dared to embrace the subscriber template. No more – it's here and effectively consumer driven; increasingly overwhelming, pervasive and vociferously insistent.

We need to understand the new exemplar, and only by constant curiosity will we find the ways to enhance corporate performance and remove ourselves from a self-imposed backwater of purely technical delivery.

Understand everything about the business we work in by asking the right questions. There is no one better placed to do this because we touch every part of the organisation and every technologist worth his salt is driven by enquiry and fired by the unknown. We constantly explore, test and expand our horizons. We crave to make things work better and more intelligently. It’s why we embrace gadgets and new tech with such zeal and fervour. But, so does everyone else now; they are beginning to understand and they want more. They want it now. Why shouldn’t what they can do at home, quite naturally and fruitfully, not be available in the workplace?

How then do we make the most of our skill-sets, expertise and hard won experience in the tumult of our new decade?

We start by asking the questions. But as we do so, always remembering, that answers must drive actions for as Thoreau said, “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?“