Scene: Christmas Day in an ordinary British household. Father and son are in the Grey Horse. Mother is in the kitchen, preparing turkey sandwiches. Grandmother watches television with Uncle Dave, an IT manager at Shadrach & Co, who is half asleep thanks to his 24x7 role at the heart of an enterprise datacentre and over-indulgence in a box of wine. In his slumbers, he hears the fruity voice of the Queen:
"The past year has been an annus horribilis for many involved in the day-to-day running of information technology, unless, that is, one happens to live in India.

"The trend towards outsourcing to offshore outposts of my Empire and even beyond is an irreversible move that the United Kingdom must face up to if it is to prosper as a service-based economy. Oh hang on a minute, that's my speech from 1981, isn't it?

"Moving on though, the good men and women who serve in the ranks of Her Majesty's IT army have been forced to show tremendous bravery this year. The searing heat of datacentres has reached peaks that have tested the endurance of even the hardiest of our people. There has even been talk of deodorant sprays being employed.

"Information technology has never been so intricately woven into the fabric of business activity. Indeed, it is often argued that, if it is to succeed, IT must move closer to finance and business strategy. Not an easy task when one works in a fetid basement and finance sits in a seventh-floor suite with a view overlooking the city and easy access to the gym.

"Neither, for that matter, has IT ever been so complex. I have been told of one company and its strategy of taking enterprise applications from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and others and in some way collecting them together in a release called Project Fusion. On the face of it at least, this sounds as facile an exercise as herding one's corgis.

"This Christmas, my thoughts are especially with those everywhere who are being asked to be better communicators, to speak the language of business, as it were, and create 'better PR'. I am therefore proposing my husband Philip to advise on such diplomatic campaigns.

"Neither has this been an easy time for IT suppliers. It cannot have been simple for chief executive Mark Hurd at HP to preside over a dysfunctional group characterised by internecine conflict, enormous privilege, ego and a suspicious attitude to the media. And, let us face it, one should know all about that.

"But the year has not all been trials and tribulations and it has impressed me that self-sacrifice still has a role to play, even among the largest enterprises. In particular, one must applaud Microsoft for insisting that client/server applications are the way forward when the rest of the world is moving to software as a service. That sort of faith in traditional values and love of heritage is truly the mark of great British companies such as ICL, Apricot, Acorn and Sinclair.

"I hope you will all have a very happy Christmas this year and that you go into the new year with renewed hope and confidence. But as my late mother would say, I wouldn't bet on it."