No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from. To stay competitive, your organization needs to anticipate the future technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to implement them in your organization.
Now that 2012 is well underway, be ready for the following 20 technology-driven trends to continue to create both disruption and opportunity in the business world. But rather than just react to them, be pre-active to future known events and plan how your company will profit from them now. That’s the only way you’ll gain competitive advantage in the coming years.
1) Rapid Growth of Big Data. Big Datais a term used to describe the technologies and techniques used to capture and utilize the exponentially increasing streams of datawith the goal ofbringing enterprise-wide visibility and insights to make rapid critical decisions. High Speed Analytics using advanced cloud services will increasingly be used as a complement to existing information management systems and programs to tame the massive data explosion. This new level of data integration and analytics will require many new skills and cross-functional buy-in in order to break down the many data and organizational silos that still exist. The rapid increase in data makes this a fast growing hard trend that cannot be ignored.
2) Cloud Computing and Advanced Cloud Services will be increasingly embraced by business of all sizes, as this represents a major shift in how organizations obtain and maintain software, hardware, and computing capacity. As consumers, we first experienced public clouds (think about when you use Google or Apple’s MobileMe and now iCloud). Then we saw more private clouds and hybrid clouds from businesses such as Flextronics, Siemens, Accenture, and many others, all using the cloud to cut costs in human resources and sales management functions. This was only the beginning, as cloud services enable the rapid transformation all business processes.
Polaroid—the company that has been teetering on the brink of extinction for a while now—recently came out with a new digital camera powered by Android. I think that’s a good move, but they’re a little late to the game in doing it.
If you remember those old Polaroid cameras, they were all about instant photography and photo sharing. You’d take the picture and it would print out from the camera, right on the spot, and you could share it with a friend.
But somehow, Polaroid missed the shift to digital and stayed with their analog model way too long. That’s why most people don’t own anything by Polaroid anymore.
In reality, Polaroid should have owned digital photography, because the digital revolution was easy to see. In fact, it was here long before the first cell phones. I know this for a fact because I was writing about digital photography as early as 1983. Unfortunately, Polaroid didn’t see digital photography as a hard trend; they saw it as a soft trend. Remember, hard trends will happen; soft trends might happen.
Because Polaroid failed to see digital photography for what it really was, today they’re playing a big catch-up game. And even with their latest release, they still have a lot of catching up to do. Their newest release, The Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera, features a high definition 16 megapixel camera with built in 3X optical zoom, touch screen display, and Wi-Fi, making uploads to social networks as easy as the touch of a button. But let’s face it…every Android phone has a camera. Every iPhone has a camera. So what they’re really giving us here is a little better lens and a zoom, which the smart phones can do now in a digital way as well.
Do we have a lot of innovation taking place here from Polaroid? No. It sounds good and it looks good. But in reality, they aren’t offering anything most people haven’t already owned for quite a while. It just didn’t have the Polaroid name on it.
So from a technology futurist’s point of view, Polaroid has to stop playing catch up and start innovating if they want to reclaim their spot as the leader in photography sharing.
The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show took place January 10-13, and it helped reinforce the continuation of a hard trend that has been growing for a while now. Back in 1993 I predicted that we’d soon be shifting from the information age to the communication age. Informing is one-way, it’s static, and it doesn’t always cause action. Communicating is two-way, it’s dynamic, it’s engaging, and it causes action.
One way to tell which age we’re in is to look at our devices. Years ago we had things like the Apple Newton and the Palm. They were basic organizers with a calendar and address book—information age devices. At the time I commented, “When that thing becomes a phone, we’ll be entering the communication age.” Today we have that plus so much more.
First, we have social media, which is more about the word “social” than the word “media.” Because it’s social, it’s two way and communicative. And with social media, you get some powerful things that businesses like, primarily engagement and action. (And of course, people like being social too.)
Also, we like to create, connect, interact, and share. And at the 2012 CES, we saw devices that are allowing consumers to not just be passive receivers, as they have in the past, but that are taking hold of the ability to create, connect, interact, and share. Anything that involves the ability to create, connect, interact, or share is powerful.
Forecasts for IT hiring are almost universally predicting that project managers and business analysts will be in demand in 2012, but what about cloud transformation officers?
With big data, mobile computing, social media, cloud computing and the consumerization of IT all converging on IT in 2012, some new — and intriguing — job titles are beginning to emerge.
Computerworld went digging and unearthed a handful of positions you can expect to see popping up more and more — along with details on what you’ll need to land one of them. Read on, future chief agile officers.
Director of cloud transformation
As companies move from the client-server world to one where systems reside in the cloud, they’re hiring professionals to oversee the entire strategy, says Al Delattre, global industry lead for technology at Los Angeles recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International.
Whether the position’s called director of cloud transformation, vice president of virtualization or cloud transformation officer — all of those titles are floating out there in the corporate world — the job description remains roughly the same: Oversee all the moving parts required to make the move to the cloud, Delattre says.
“This position is like being a conductor of an orchestra. It’s a series of 500 projects over seven years. You have to make sure it works and it’s sequenced,” he says. “No one person is an expert on all of it,” which means multiple specialists are often involved — and that, in turn, spurs some companies to seek out an overseeing director.
As bleak as the prospect of a long winter might be, at least you can be sure that it’s going to give way to spring.
It’s a shame you can’t be as certain about an economic rebound, a resurgence in hiring or even whether your job or employer will be secure in the coming year.
Yet there are changes and trends you can be confident will happen in the near future, and they can be used to design career strategies to weather even the most prolonged economic chill, according to technology trends consultant Daniel Burrus, author of Flash Foresight.(To read an excerpt from the book,click here.)
“A career strategy based on uncertainty has high risk. When the level of uncertainty is high, if you put off making decisions … it can keep you from moving forward both personally and organizationally,” he said in an interview.
“It has been never more important to ask what we can know for certain, and plan from there,” said Mr. Burrus, who is chief executiveofficer of Burrus Research Associates Inc. in Hartland, Wis.
In terms of TV, Xbox is doing something that Apple TV has been doing for years, but Xbox is taking it to a new level. With Apple TV you have Hulu, Netflix, and Access. You can play games, watch TV, and read your emails. But the thing that the Xbox is bringing to users is their Kinect system, which includes a 3D video camera combined with voice recognition to allow users to control the screen with their hand and body movements. No mouse and no remote control—just hand and body movements.
This is taking the Xbox on a predictable path. In the late 1980s I predicted that IPTV (internet protocol television) was where we were going. Now here we are. And in the future, IPTV will continue to grow.
Looking at the hard trends around us, it’s clear to me that the real future of television is apps. Have you ever wondered why you can have 500+ cable channels and nothing to watch? It’s because you don’t have AppTV.
To understand how AppTV would work, let’s look at the iPhone. Two people can have an iPhone and have the same service provider. But those two phones would be completely different from each other. Why? Because when you have an iPhone, you customize it for your needs by picking the apps that are significant to you. You turn an iPhone into a MyPhone.
In that same way, with AppTV your TV will be customized for you. Think of it as an iPad big enough to be in your living room. Here’s how it will work: We will be using apps on the TV so that when you sit down to watch, you’ll have a customized viewing experience rather than hundreds of stations you don’t want to watch.
Not only that, but there will be a camera on those TVs, just like the tablets and smart phones have today, and it will use facial recognition. So when you walk in the living room, it will know you are there and will self-configure the right apps for you. If the entire family is in the room, you’ll use your voice to let it know which apps you want to have available.
For example, if your family consists of five people—two adults and three kids—and the dad and one child are in the room, the system will have the apps for those two individuals available for them. The two people can then decide which of those shows they want to watch.
So IPTV and apps is the future of television. And what the XBox is doing today is part of that progression. As the technology progresses, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, as well as other manufacturers, will continually fine tune it, making the future of TV happen today.
Mobile shopping activity increases, forces retailers to improve apps, online services
By Sandra M. Jones, Chicago Tribune reporter
When many Americans enter a store these days, they have three things: a wallet, a shopping list and a smartphone.
Until recently, smartphones did little more than help shoppers find a store location or take a photo of a product to share with friends. A few sophisticated shoppers showed off their shopping apps for checking inventory or comparing prices, but they were few and far between.
Not this year.
As mobile shopping activity increases, the pressure on physical stores to compete instantaneously with online retailers is growing. Two-thirds of smartphone owners shop from their mobile devices, according to a report released Wednesday from Chicago-based digital research firm ComScore Inc. And one of the most common shopping activities is comparing prices, a feature that threatens to take a cut out of bricks-and-mortar stores’ sales and profits.
With a smartphone, a consumer can look over a product in a store, check the price and then buy it online or at another traditional retailer.
“Mobile phones are empowering consumers to find the best prices on the things they want and to compare among merchants,” said Mark Donovan, a senior vice president at ComScore. “We’ve been able to do that on a PC for a long time.”
Indeed, 30 percent of smartphone shoppers research product and price details from their cellphones and 26 percent scan bar codes to compare prices among various retailers, ComScore said. That figure is expected to grow as more shoppers rely on smartphones as their personal shopping concierge.
When Occupy Wall Street began, many asked the question of the protesters, “What do you want?” and they said, “We want dialogue. We want communication with Wall Street, because it’s a closed club. It’s a closed community. Those of us that are on the outside, all they do is inform us.”
That wasn’t very clear to media and, most especially, Wall Street- typically protesters want something very specific, rather than simply communication.
But if you look, what they were trying to say is that organizations, whether it be government or be a company, are really Information Age companies. And it’s a big difference between informing and communicating: informing is one-way, it’s static; communicating is 2-way and dynamic and, by the way, usually causes action.
Social media is all about communicating- it’s a Communication Age technology. It’s about creating communication, interaction, dialogue and engagement, which is very different than how corporations work internally. In other words, I’ve surveyed hundreds of thousands of companies around the world, in the last couple of years, and all of them, 100% of them admitted that they were much better at informing than communicating internally and externally.
In other words, Wall Street doesn’t know how to do what the protesters want, and that is dialogue/communication.
The good news is that Communication Age tools are relatively free, and available to corporations. And they’re now starting to understand that social media is not just for the kids and young adults, but rather it is a powerful business tool. Companies must be both the Information Age and the Communication Age. It’s the future. It’s the visible future, it’s definitely a hard trend.
Spontaneous demonstrations have popped up around the world and around this country before- that’s nothing new. They’ve been happening for over 45 years, including during the Vietnam War era.
But what is different about the movements most recently is Smartphones: 85% of phones sold globally this year have been Smartphones. This translates to internet, email and social media access.
Cumulatively, Smartphones sold over the last several years create an enormous user base of people with access to this inexpensive type of computer. This enables an increasing number of spontaneous demonstrations, because these Smartphones and most importantly, the instant information and communication they provide makes it very easy to organize them. It’s so easy to get large numbers of people to meet at a specific point, and it’s also very easy to find people of like minds.
For example, there are many forms, let’s call them “online communities of interest.”
There are 2 types of online communities: online communities of interest and online communities of practice. Not many use practice, but it can be very big for business.
For example, an online community of practice might be chief financial officers from banking, and all of the chief financial officers of all banks might decide to have an electronic community for that level.
Or, it could be a company. For example, one of my clients has over 30,000 engineers. So, maybe it’s a community of practice of engineers within that company, since there are so many. They problem-solve and share best practices.
Communities of interest, on the other hand, the subject or interest might be sailboats. But not just any sailboat, it might be a 15-foot laser sailboat, or it might be a 50-foot sailboat, or it might be a certain brand of sailboat. Or it could be a Corvette; but not just any Corvette, it might be 1960 Corvettes.
Now there are literally millions of these communities of interest, where people are laser-light focused on one area.
So, if you’re trying to set up a protest, you can do a quick search for “communities of interest,” find many, many people that are interested in that one thing, and invite them to the protest. And bingo, there you go, you’ve got yourself a protest.
You can find them easily, using GPS and other means to target them geographically, or have them meet simultaneously in major cities, and make it even global.
The point being that it’s going to be easier and easier to organize protests and have large turnouts, and to build momentum with them. Now, we are just beginning to see that.
I think we were all interested in seeing what happened in the Middle East, some of the protests, and how quickly those were formed and spread. And, of course, we all know that was done with the spread of Smartphones.
Soon, all phones will be Smartphones, because it’s becoming less and less expensive to create the components that are needed for a phone to be smart; meaning getting Internet access and email.
Q&A talks about social media and the Occupy movement with author and futurist Daniel Burrus. His consulting business is Burrus Research Associates in Hartland, Wis.
Q: You put forth the question: Is the 1 percent of the population’s wealth really fueling the Occupy protests across the nation, including Hartford, or is it that with social media it is so easy to get a protest going no matter what the cause? OK, which is it?
A: The Occupy protests are due to shared concerns by a large number of people, but they are only the latest in a series of protests that have been enabled by social media and there will be many more on a variety of subjects. It has never been easier to get a protest going anywhere in the world using social media tools to both connect to the targeted audience, in this case potential protesters due to their discussions, interactions and communities of interest, and arrange a specific time and place to meet. This will become easier every year due to increasing technical advances.
Q: Spontaneous demonstrations that pop up across the country hardly seem new, though. In the last 45 years, since the Vietnam War for example, there have been events like these. What’s different?
A: Smart phones. Because smart phones are with us all the time, and they are both a phone and an inexpensive computer that has access to the Internet including social media, and 85 percent of all phones sold globally this year are smart phones, and there were already a large number of smart phones in use in 2010. Spontaneous demonstrations will continue to be the new normal.
Virtualization is the hottest new technotrend, with everything from commerce and supply chain management to storage and processing power migrating into the cloud and into virtual realities.
The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent.
Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing servers is just the tip of the iceberg. The trend to virtualize everything from servers to processing power to software offerings actually started years ago in the personal sector. In the recent past, it was common for individuals within major organizations to use virtualized services or cloud computing when at home, but at work they weren’t using those services at all. Why? Because corporate IT didn’t trust the lack of security of the cloud, and they weren’t sure it was a hard trend–something that was definitely here to stay. Today, we know better.
In order to fully understand how virtualization and cloud computing will transform the business world, let’s first look at the evolution of these capabilities.
No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from. To stay competitive, your organization needs to anticipate the future technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to implement them in your organization.
In terms of TV, Xbox is doing something that Apple TV has been doing for years, but Xbox is taking it to a new level. With Apple TV you have Hulu, Netflix, and Access. You can play games, watch TV, and read your emails. But the thing that the Xbox is bringing to users is their Kinect system, which includes a 3D video camera combined with voice recognition to allow users to control the screen with their hand and body movements. No mouse and no remote control—just hand and body movements.
The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent.
