CNET's the social: Earnings are healthy and new digital-ad networks are debuting by the day, but no one can deny that these economic times demand caution.

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"The turbulence in the housing, mortgage, credit, and financial services sectors is spilling into the tech sector."

"Rather than continuing to scrutinize the productivity figures, I'd like to shift topics. Everyone agrees that productivity growth is a critical measure, but it's not the only one managers care about, and it's not the only one that could be influenced by IT. Productivity growth measures whether the economic pie is getting bigger, but it's also important to understand how that pie is being divided up. "

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A recent eWeek article reported that a United States "policy think tank" found that in the past decade, information technology boosted the U.S. economy by $2 trillion dollars.

"For the United States alone, what we found was that because of the digital revolution, GDP is $2 trillion larger today than it would have been had growth in the post-1995 era proceeded at the 1974 to 1995 rate," said Robert D. Atkinson, Ph.D., president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

 "We need to recognize this phenomenon and adjust our thinking to make IT a centerpiece of our economic policy--from planning and forecasting to tax policies that incent future growth."

Two trillion dollars - that my friends is a lot of money.   Hopefully, those of us in information technology will not be so hesitant in the future to ask for that raise or time off we so deserve.  Of course, there is one problem for those of us who chose careers as IT professionals.  The problem is we make the IT job look so darn easy that those guys upstairs don't quite recognize difficult IT tasks when they see it.  IT professionals contribute so much more in the business than the business managers want to admit.  I say that it's time we work on our game plan...