Every 90 days, the ZDNet Australia team invites a representative sample of IT professionals to participate in the IT Priorities Research Program.

We ask them three open-ended questions:

• "Currently, what are your IT organisation's top three priorities (defined as those that have the most resources dedicated to them)?"
• "What are the three most important technology initiatives your IT organisation plans to implement over the next 12 months?"
• "What technology trends do you believe will most affect your IT environment in the next 18-24 months?"

These free-form answers are then hand-coded and mapped to our comprehensive list of IT categories. From there, the data is analysed to produce five IT priorities which rank the highest on average against the three time periods. Several inferential statistics are calculated to confirm the robustness of the underlying trends.

Once the top five areas are determined, our editors look for the best related information available throughout the ZDNet Australia Web site. These topics are used to shape the content that sits around IT Priorities for that given quarter.

The IT Priority with the highest consistent ranking by time window (current issue, medium-term, long-term) becomes a focus for ZDNet Australia's editorial team, which then enhances relevant topic sections of the site, article content, and specially created information toolkits.

If you have any questions about the IT Priorities research, would like to offer your feedback, or are keen to become involved, simply e-mail itpriorities@zdnet.com.au.

Fran Foo
Editor, Insight.