December is upon us, and arriving as predictably as department store Santas are IT analysts peeking into their crystal balls. There seems to be a general consensus that there will be increased activity in the areas of cloud computing, enterprise mobility and big data in the year ahead. Here is a sampling of the predictions from Gartner and IDC.

Gartner's analysts predict that technologies, costs and budgets will become more fluid and distributed throughout organizations, reducing IT's control. Consumerization of IT and cloud computing exemplify the trend. CIOs increasingly will have to coordinate with a wider set of stakeholders, including "those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT," Daryl Plummer, Gartner's managing vice president predicted.

By 2015, more than one-third of IT spending at most organizations will be managed external to the IT budget, in Gartner's view.  In some cases, IT projects will be re-labeled business projects and managed within business units. CIOs should brace themselves for watching part of their budget moved to other areas within the organization, the analysts warn.

In the meantime, Gartner's analysts fear that the ever-expanding volume of information available to organizations, coupled with IT's diminishing control, will make it harder to ensure the consistency and effectiveness of data. They also offer some grim forecasts for outsourcers, enterprise social software makers, and cybersecurity:

- "By 2015, low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15 percent of top outsourcing players' revenue."

- "In 2013, the investment bubble will burst for consumer social networks, and for enterprise social software companies in 2014."

- "Through 2016, the financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10 percent per year, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities."

IDC's analysts also see a busy year ahead for cloud computing, enterprise mobility and big data. Up to 20 percent of IT spending worldwide will be driven by smartphones, tablets, mobile networks, social networking and data analytics, they predict. A full 80 percent of new commercial enterprise applications will be deployed in the cloud.

The mobility sector is in store for especially intensified competition, according to IDC. For the first time, spending on mobile data networks will surpass spending on fixed data networks. Next year will be "the Year of Mobile Ascendency as mobile devices (smartphones and media tablets) surpass PCs in both shipments and spending and mobile apps, with 85 billion downloads, generate more revenue than the mainframe market," the analysts predict.

I've never been accused of being overly optimistic, but some of the predictions driving a reduced role for IT seem just a little too gloomy. Cloud computing and IT consumerization have momentum, to be sure, but is it accelerating fast enough to edge IT pros out of the game quite as the analysts envision? Here's my prediction: It won't take business leaders long to discover that it isn't as easy to manage IT projects as they might think it is, and organizations will find that it can be unnecessarily costly to put important IT spending decisions in the hands of non-IT experts. - Caron