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.

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.

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.

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…