A research agenda for business-driven information technology

On Demand Computing is a popular vision of the future in which businesses will respond nimbly to new opportunities and threats. Unfortunately, the ever-growing complexity of IT is a key inhibitor of this vision, as it raises the cost and risk of altering systems, rendering them ever more ponderous. Since the purpose of autonomic computing is to reverse the trend of increasing IT complexity, it is a critically important enabler for On Demand Computing, or businessdriven IT. In this paper, we situate autonomic computing within the broader context of business-driven IT, and use the resulting picture to motivate and discuss a research agenda that we and our colleagues at IBM have begun to pursue.