There are reports on IT every day. Boring, dead reports. Here’s one everyone should read. After reading it, decide how much you are willing to do to grow.

In the December 2006 edition of CIO, an article from CIO and the MIT CISR covered the stages of enterprise architecture. Essentially, organizations go through stages of IT maturity.

Don’t miss this table.

When reading the article, please keep in mind most companies stop at Stage 2 (Standardized Technology) and one can be in multiple stages at once if there are multiple divisions of an organization.

Moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3 (Standardized Processes) is very tough. This is why most firms do not ever move out of Stage 2. Its easy to look at the budget and think, “What can we cut or what can stay the same as last year?” It requires minimal thinking and nothing extravagant.

When one desires to standardize processes (Stage 3), multiple areas of an organization are called into play. People must change the way they work, coordinate terms and understand what they do every day. All of the knowledge contained in brains has to be committed to paper (or electrons) so process planning can occur.

Process planning is the work that causes stress. People from different departments write down how they think the total process works and are shocked to find out the process is wrong or inefficient. Positions may be eliminated and created, too. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep on keepin’ on?

My children will not remember a TV without a Net connection. The boys are 5 and almost 2. By the time they are 10, all TVs will connect to the Net natively.

Sony just released a new TV that reads RSS channels. This means the couch potato will be able to surf from a La-z-boy with little to no hassle. One could do it, now, but it requires a bit of technical know-how.

Yahoo just cut a deal with an Internet TV firm. Brightcove delivers video for content owners and producers. Like IFC and National Geographic.

I’m sure many services will pop up over the next few years.

We already have provider options, but there’s a bandwidth issue. Depending on who you talk to this is an issue or its not. I don’t think it is yet because there’s not a high penetration of heavy bandwidth home users. As soon as its easy for the average person to access the content, then the home Net providers will want to raise rates.

The biggest issue I see is content. With the ability to spawn (and I use that term on purpose) new channels because one can, people may create a channel and not think about populating it. We all know what that looks like — Law & Order on 15 different channels. While Law & Order is a show in demand, some of the content for these insta-channels may not be as desired.

There will be a proliferation of insta-channels and a bunch of people who see low- to no-talent shows and be turned off. Then, like the web, people will create guides to channels and shows. Eventually, it’ll all balance out and we’ll wonder why there’s nothing to watch on one million channels.

(I bet Google owns the ad network for many of these channels, too.)

Since its Jan 1, 2007, I thought I’d start out the first post of the new year by letting everyone know about the Superhero quiz. Check out my results and a link to it at the bottom:

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man 80% Green Lantern 60% Superman 55% Spider-Man 55% Hulk 55% The Flash 55% Catwoman 55% Robin 47% Supergirl 45% Wonder Woman 40% Batman 30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

To look up more on your superhero, visit Wikipedia.