We enjoyed the article What Gartner is Telling Your Boss, which discusses Gartner’s view of the future of application development:

"The future of application development is not about programmer productivity," said [Matt Hoyle, Gartner Analyst] during the keynote presentation, "but in assembling functionality from components." While programming will not go away, he stressed, programming has decreasing importance in delivering excellence. "Assembling, buying, and extracting is an increasing part of what you need to do," he said. To be more agile and responsive, application development managers have to manipulate, orchestrate, and compose new business processes, using resources available from outside partners, third-party applications, Web services, and existing code components. [Dale Veccio, gartner analyst] asked, "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"

Bloggers tended to focus on the implication that Gartner is advocating the use of open source code. But I think the bigger picture is that managing software and IT projects is not just about technology decisions. We have to do Project Execution and Governance better: by knowing which projects to do and which to kill.

Moreover, there has to be more emphasis on optimizing the investments the company has already made in infrastructure, technology and R&D. There has been a shift in emphasis in the marketplace from investing in the "next new thing" to better leveraging current investments.