What’s Next: Top Trends

#7

July 24th, 2008

7. Rise of the Machines

What is it?
In the future, chips will be embedded in almost everything and almost everything will know where it is. While true artificial intelligence is still a long way off, we are already seeing the emergence of increasingly intelligent machines that can ‘talk’ to each other. We are also seeing machines that can ‘recognise’ individual users and machines that can work out what mood a user is in and adjust themselves accordingly.

The consequences of this are significant. First people and objects will be monitored and measured from afar. Items with digital components will be remotely serviced or upgraded while other devices will be able to certify that something is what it says it is – everything from people and machine parts to food and bottles of medicine will carry a digital trace of where they’re from and, perhaps, where they’re been.

Opportunities:
The use of machines to speed up transactions, predict what people want (often before the person knows themselves) and devices that adapt themselves to the user rather than the other way around.

Risks:
People could grow increasingly uncomfortable with machines that seemingly know everything about them. There could also be a flight away from high-tech to high-touch, especially if the economy turns sour.

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July 23rd, 2008

6.Open Innovation

What is it?
A trick borrowed from the open-source software movement. Companies are wising up to the fact that none of their employees is as smart as all of their employees. Really smart companies are also looking at innovation in terms of open networks and are engaging in highly collaborative relationships with communities of suppliers and customers.

Opportunities:
Getting closer to customers and suppliers, speeding up the innovation process, fast feed-back loops. The open model could also be a template for what the firm of the future might look like. For example, Mozilla Corporation has around 100 employees and almost 200,000 volunteer helpers.

Risks:
Decision paralysis caused by too much information and/or too many ideas. Also managing the expectations of people that have been brought into the innovation process. There are also latent legal risks with regard to openly created intellectual property.

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IT Trends

July 22nd, 2008

5.Shopping 2.0

What is it?
Social media is blending with e-commerce to create what’s being called social shopping or shopping 2.0. In the real world, shopping is an event. It is an experience, often shared, and people listen to the recommendations of friends and trusted experts. At least women do.

This fact has not escaped the attention of various r(e)-tail entrepreneurs and we are starting to see the emergence of sites like Crowdstorm, ThisNext, Karboodle, woot, zebo and Stylehive that tap into various social networking principles and allow friends to discuss particular shops, review or vote on specific products or shop as a virtual group in real time. Price comparisons are also easy and, crucially, there is the opportunity to form large groups
to buy quantities of specific products, negotiating a great deal along the way.

Opportunities:
Using technology to make the online shopping experience more real (e.g. the use of haptics). In general this means making the experience more fluid, with less emphasis on scrolling through pages of text. Also using social networks to allow people to share shopping experiences, recommend particular products or shop as part of a group.

Risks:
Data theft, ID theft, online fraud, consumer concerns surrounding digital privacy.

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IT Trends

July 21st, 2008

4.Virtualisation

What is it?
As physical movement becomes more difficult and more expensive, companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Crayola are setting up virtual offices and virtual meetings rooms to allow employees to communicate and interact. This is happening in other spheres too. In education, students are downloading lectures so they don’t have to show up in person, while cyberspaces are also being used for training purposes and data storage.

Opportunities:
Virtual meetings can reduce carbon footprints. Digital meetings can also be stored, or even downloaded onto an iPod or computer, so that they can be ‘attended’ at a later date. Remote data back-up and secure storage is also emerging as an opportunity within the home.

Risks:
Virtual meetings are not carbon-free (they still use electricity) and having an avatar attend a meeting can mean that people miss vital clues such as body language. Equally, doing away with physical office space entirely is possibly a bad idea because there is still a need for people to physically interact if you want to achieve any meaningful sense of community.

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IT Trends

July 11th, 2008

3.Data Mining

What is it?

Mining data isn’t new but it’s becoming more universal because software to filter or analyse large volumes of data is becoming increasingly powerful. For example, around 2,000 résumés per day are sent to Fortune 500 companies in the US, with around 90% sent in by email or via company websites. As a result, companies are using word-scanning software to decide who’s worth seeing and who isn’t. Another example is Australia’s Centrelink, which uses what it calls a Job Seekers’ Classification Instrument to work out the probability that a claimant will become long-term unemployed and adjusts the help that’s made available to the claimant.

Opportunities:

Extracting information from large data sets or databases to create forecasts or predictions about future events or behaviour. Hence goods and services will be increasingly personalised to address the needs of micro-segments of the population.

Risks:

Data collected by one company or government department could be passed on to others without permission.

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IT Trends

July 10th, 2008

2. Data Risk & Security

What is it?

We will see increased awareness of data leaks and individuals will become more cynical about the ability of large organizations (and especially governments) to keep ‘their’ data safe and secure.
This anxiety will drive data encryption services and regulation and will impact on risk management processes. It may also drive litigation in some extreme instances. The growth of online banking, P2P lending and contactless payments will also make data security a larger headache for IT buyers and sellers.

Opportunities:

Secure data storage services, anti-spyware products, data encryption and data risk analysis.

Risks:

Government regulation, spyware in organizations, data theft using iPods or other mobile storage devices, mobile phone viruses, cyber terrorists targeting companies rather than countries, people (and perhaps companies) reducing their use of IT or going offline altogether due to worries about ID theft and digital privacy.

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IT Trends

July 9th, 2008

Here is the first of my ten final IT trends - in no particular order.

1.Green IT

What is it?

Green computing is the idea that IT use should address wider social and even ethical concerns, especially the environment. Thus Green IT aims to reduce or remove harmful or hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency (especially servers and data centers) and promote materials reduction, recycling and reuse. Whether this idea ever extends to persuading people to buy fewer products is an interesting question that might be asked with increasing frequency as resource shortages start to bite. What does look certain is that increasing energy costs will make energy savings in general a priority.

Opportunities:

Cost saving initiatives, end of life recycling schemes and ‘life story’ labeling. Also CIOs driving the energy efficiency and sustainability message throughout organisations with IT becoming a central communications point (this could be done by making CIOs responsible for the corporate energy budget).

Risks:

Growing eco-exhaustion amongst consumers (e.g. the Asus bamboo laptop), CSR-cynicism and higher levels of regulation. Also the fact that this is yet another ‘essential’ item to add to the already over-stuffed CIO to-do list.

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IT Trends

July 8th, 2008

After much tooing and froing here’s my final Top 10 IT Trends list for 2008/9. The list could obviously go on and on but I think it’s a reasonable summation of where most CIOs heads are at. The only thing that could be missing is the skills shortage within IT.

1.Green IT
2.Data Risk & Security
3.Data Mining
4.Virtualisation
5.Shopping 2.0
6.Open Innovation
7.Rise of the Machines
8.Process automation
9.Too Much Information
10.Simplicity

I’ll expand on each of these in due course…

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Top IT Trends

June 27th, 2008

I’m researching IT trends for a forthcoming talk and wonder if anyone has any comments on this little list?

IT Trends (not ranked)

1. Data Mining (profiling & prediction)
2. Data Security (governance, encryption, risk management & regulation)
3. Open Innovation & Customer Co-creation
4. Too Much Information (information diets)
5. Metadata trails (possibly the same as #1?)
6. Automation (DIY & serve yourself technology)
7. Green IT & Clean Tech
8. Storage as a Service
9. E-records (especially healthcare)
10. Virtualisation (part of #8?)
11. Gesture Based Computing
12. Emotionally Aware Machines & Devices
13. Shopping 2.0
14. Mobile phones replacing wallets
(Incl. stored value, contactless payments, micro-payments, P2P lending etc)

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Human Contact a Cyber Failing

May 27th, 2008

Something I wrote for the Herald Sun Newspaper…

In America, you can attend a Cuddle Party. This is where a group of strangers pay to hug each other. According to cuddleparty.com, it’s “a place for people to rediscover non-sexual touch and affection”.Only in America right?

Wrong. Cuddle Parties are taking off in Australia, too.

These parties are clearly a fad, and I’m sure they attract more than their fair share of Harry Potter-reading, pyjama-wearing weirdos, but they’re also perhaps an early indication of the fact that an increasing number of people, many of whom now live alone, crave the sensation of being physically held and touched.

Like many fringe ideas, it may also represent an unmet need - in this case a remedy for sadness or loneliness.

These Cuddle Parties represent a safe form of intimacy-on-demand that appeals to singles and married couples alike, many of whom are either too busy or tired to become involved with any other form of shared physical activity.

On one level this craving for instant intimacy is ironic because in many other areas we are being told to accept as “normal” behaviour that is exactly the opposite. Physically touching a colleague at work (and I’m talking here about affectionate hugs) is now strictly verboten.

Research by Manchester Metropolitan University also says there is a growing anxiety in childcare circles about touching children.Recent panics include a male teacher who instructed a small child to apply a plaster himself because the teacher was too afraid to touch the child.

This is clearly insane but the madness isn’t restricted to loony politicians and pediatricians. Organisations are also trying to convince us that reducing human contact is a good thing because it saves us time and money.

It’s the new economy dude. Society 2.0. They are liars. Reducing human contact saves them time and money.

It’s the same with social networking sites. Some people claim that we have never been better connected. Apparently, people on Facebook have an average of 150 friends. But these are digital acquaintances.

These are superficial friends and we are confusing familiarity with intimacy. Hence our growing need for physical contact. Even the environment has been roped in to help sell us the lie that less human contact is healthy.

There are organisations out there right now encouraging us to hold meetings in cyberspace because this reduces carbon emissions. Really?

I thought that computers were powered by electricity from burning oil and coal, so where’s the logic in that? But even if these e-vangelicals are right they are still wrong. For instance, sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University North Carolina have found that Americans have fewer real friends than they used to.

In 1985, the average American had three people to talk to about their problems. Now the figure is just two. Why? Longer working hours are one reason but the real culprit is technology. Use of the internet and mobile phones has reduced face-to-face contact.

People need to intimately connect with other people.

If they don’t, there is a danger that they will spend too much time inhabiting virtual worlds like Second Life.This is not good for them and is not good for the planet either. People need people because happiness comes from intimate interactions with friends and family.

Moreover, as everyone instinctively knows, new ideas are born serendipitously in places like stairwells and over lunch, not at overly orchestrated brainstorms or government summits where most of the solutions are so small that they could be mistaken for homeopathic remedies.

We need to establish an intimate relationship with the thought that a life lived remotely, or at a physical distance from others, is ultimately unbearable. Time, in other words, for a physical revolution.

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