Albert Ellis is Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Nash, the global professional recruitment and IT Outsourcing consultancy.

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Mr. Obama said last Wednesday in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

The Times in London reports extensively on the up and coming Presidential inauguration. Great American presidents have emerged from the great challenges. Rees-Mogg says "The greatest president of the 20th century was Franklin Roosevelt who had to overcome the challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The greatest president of the 19th century was Abraham Lincoln, who had to meet the challenge of the Civil War. The presidency of Barack Obama will also be shaped by the challenges he faces; he has to overcome the depression that began in 2007. He also has to create a foreign policy that will restore international confidence in the United States. Apparently, according to insiders, Obama has taken Roosevelt and Lincoln as his chief role models, and it is the image of Lincoln he has chosen to emphasise as he prepares for his inauguration. The first black president naturally feels kinship with the president who abolished slavery. Mr Obama has formed his Cabinet on Lincoln’s principles, appointing the strongest individuals, whether or not they agree with each other and whether or not they have been his rivals for the presidency. Mr Obama is said to have been reading Team of Rivals, an excellent book on Lincoln’s choice of colleagues written by the Pulitzer prizewinner Doris Kearns Goodwin."

Obama, like Lincoln and Roosevelt, is a natural orator of exceptional gifts, his speeches allow him to persuade the public to support his policies with gifts of eloquence, humor and sympathy. Mr Obama has already said that the recession will be the biggest problem for his new administration and this is likely to prove correct.

President Obama, as he will be tomorrow, has changed everything about America already - not just by being what he is but by being who he is. He is not just the first black president. He is the first Blackberry president. And the first President to mobilise Generation Y in such an impressive way last year. It is said that when George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the personal possession he brought with him from home was his feather pillow.

Tina Brown, editor in chief of www.thedailybeast.com says what the pillow was to Mr Bush the Blackberry is to the new President. Mr Obama has been resisting the security agencies’ attempts to pry his fingers from around his beloved electronic device. His fight to keep his Blackberry shows how strongly he doesn’t want to be cut off and how much at home he is with his personal communication and technological devices. Like Generation Y, President Obama will be connected. Wired and online. Of that we can be sure. When he applied his skill to the internet, 12 million volunteers were literally conjured out of the air. Not only could he deploy his web army to distribute his leaflets, raise his funds and sell his policies, he could speak directly to them whenever he hit a snag. When he accepted the Democratic nomination, tens of thousands held up their glowing mobile phones like candles at a rock concert. Like Lance Armstrong’s use of Twitter to control what his fans hear about him from the traditional media, these "rock stars of the people" can set and control their own personal agendas. That’s the real power of the current technology.

But Mr Obama was not just ahead of the curve in the way he understands the web. He understands instinctively that the old structures have to be broken down and reassembled if we are to compete in the new world. The same will prove true of business. The election delivered a seismic shock not just to the political world but to the top of Fortune 500 corporations. Call it the Obama effect - a sudden hunger for creativity and innovation, a recognition that we have to be less "massive" and more nimble. It may have come too late for some, as we watch in unbelief at the bankrupt auto dinosaurs sending their leadership to Washington with begging bowls in corporate jets.

The mantra of the next decade will be more consensual, less top-down, more cellular, less gigantic. By the end of this new presidential era every CEO who boasts that he has no time to use the internet, or cannot understand what the iPhone revolution has done to business, will be gone.

Right now, however all eyes are on Washington. Harvey Nash has sent technical expertise from its Nash Tech research facility in Nuremburg to the inauguration ceremony to support a US based client.

Many people already feel that expectations have risen into the stratosphere, and that the new President will never be able to meet them. There must be a high risk of "expectation deflation" as the global economy deflates in 2009.

But, if anyone can renew the progress of the American people, it will be the Blackberry President.