20 20 TECHA VISION OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT IN TECHNOLOGY

Foreword: What next?

An apocalyptic time?

Wanted: a smarter society

Future imperfect

Whatever you want

Art of the possible

The changing role of the CIO

Quantum solace

A smarter core

Sort of reminds me of something...

INCLUDED IN THE VISION

WHAT NEXT?

We might not notice at the time, but afterwards we will pause and say with some surprise ‘Look how far we’ve come!’

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WHAT NEXT?

Ever since God made the technology pundit there have been predictions as to where the accelerated movements of bits, bytes, atoms and electrons will take us next. The forecaster’s tendency to hyperbole has led to many a bad call and predictions of everlasting nectar and ambrosia have met the same fate as tips of impending doom.

My longstanding conviction is that, contrary to consensual wisdom, the technology world does not in fact move at lightning speed. What’s new will tomorrow be old hat, the fast becomes slow, the state of the art is relegated to the status of a relic — so goes the clichéd view, but in reality most change is incremental. We have been talking about the ‘new’ trend of cloud computing for 10 years and the principles date back about five years previous to that.

What tends to happen is a sort of quick-quick-slow with dull periods interpolated by frenetic bursts of activity. The speed of those bursts can have a blurring effect. It’s only with hindsight that we realise the scale of the change that has occurred. The smartphone morphed into our lives and changed the way we communicate; broadband did the same. At some point we changed and were never the same again. We just didn’t realise it at the time.

By 2020, I expect a huge change to have taken place: the shift to cloud computing as the primary way large businesses run IT operations. This change could lead to a new, slower era in IT where the old forklift upgrades, patching and maintenance no longer exist on the client side.

Augmented reality, where smartphone cameras overlay information, and the Internet of Things, where dumb devices are rendered intelligent, will also change the way we absorb information, find things or discover information about their capabilities. We might not notice at the time, but afterwards we will pause and say with some surprise ‘Look how far we’ve come!’

But this book is not about what I think. It’s a spot-check of what a group of highly respected journalists and analysts think. The nature of the beast is that most of what you read will turn out to be at least part wrong. But I hope you agree that it makes for fascinating reading.

Martin Veitch Head of Client StrategyBite Communications

AN APOCALYPTIC

TIME?

There is only one thing that matters about the year 2020 – it is regarded by many scientists as the latest possible date for global greenhouse gas emissions to peak if we are to stand any hope of avoiding runaway climate change.

We face a gargantuan challenge over the next decade if we are to deliver the deep cuts in emissions that are required and the global economy will have to change in some fundamental and unexpected ways. Many of the necessary changes will take place at the infrastructure level and will have little impact on the day-to-day activities of individuals and businesses. But others will change the way we all live.

Most significantly, our relationship with energy will have to change. Smart meters and smart appliances will make everyone painfully aware of how much energy they are using at all times, providing a constant nudge to encourage people to save energy where possible. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of electric cars and renewable energy technologies, such as solar panels and small scale wind turbines, will ensue that the urgent need to cut carbon emissions will weave its way into every aspect of our lives.

Less visible, but just as revolutionary, will be the dematerialisation of many technologies. The combination of concerns over carbon emissions, resource scarcity and soaring oil and energy prices, will encourage businesses and individuals to come up with innovative new ways to avoid any product or activity that wastes resources. CDs and DVDs will go the way of cassettes and videos as people realise it is more efficient to access data online, flights will increasingly be replaced by video conferencing, green communities will increasingly share and trade materials, reducing the need to constantly consume new products.

Businesses will have to change the habit of a lifetime and find innovative ways to make money while doing and making less. But ultimately the future of the planet depends on their success.

James MurrayEditorBusinessGreen.com

A SMARTER

SOCIETY

WANTED:

The networks may have got smarter but we, as a society, haven’t.

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In the next 10 years, technology will continue to surprise us. Not through its capabilities, but through its social impact. It will continue to do the opposite of its promise. And what’s the point of technology, unless it creates the outcome you wanted? The networks may have got smarter but we, as a society, haven’t.

We all know reasonably well what the long-term trends are going to be. Smartphones will get more powerful and more portable. Virtualisation will give us cheaper computing power and cloud computing could make the delivery of applications more accessible to a wider section of the public. Social networking will spread, like Japanese knotweed, choking all the more cultured communications flowers in the garden.

These will be the causes of change in society. But, as we learned from the rise of the internet, the effects aren’t always foreseen. Where is the level playing field and the democratisation we were promised? Arguably, the social divide is greater than ever after 10 years of online commerce. The savings made by big corporations were never passed on to us. Global communications gave us worse service.

The economic benefits of ‘perfect information’ were never delivered. A cynic might say that is possibly because nobody wanted the public to have that much power. On the other hand, soothsayers predicted that the e-commerce revolution would devastate the high street. That effect never materialised, and town centres did not become wastelands.

Software, hardware and mobile technology will become more mature and more powerful, as will social networking. Whether all this makes us more mature and empowered is another question altogether.

Nick BoothTechnology ColumnistCity AM

FUTURE IMPERFECT

A whole generation will have started to go bananas through exposure to overdoses of wireless communication.

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The way things are going, by 2020 consumers will be cosseted into little cube boxes they’ll call home, wired up to a web that watches their every move. They’ll be fed by intravenous drip.

There will be no high street, no parks and any open spaces will be fenced off over ‘security’ concerns. People will order the goods they need online through a huge conglomerate called Tescbury’s which will deliver to the door in little electric buggies.

The main growth industry will be digging up landfill sites looking for plastic bags, broken motherboards and old mobile phones that can be recycled into toys and gadgets for the overclass who communicate with one another via chip implant.

A growing underclass will be banned from the wired world. They’ll subsist through barter, smoke genetically-modified weed and occasionally set up portable hacking stations with which they will amuse themselves no end by sending local chip implants haywire. Their lives will be much more fun, but they’ll run the risk of the reinstated death penalty brought back specifically for hacking offences.

The Thames Barrier will be submerged and the average annual temperature in the UK will be 38 degrees Celsius. A whole generation will have started to go bananas through exposure to overdoses of wireless communication and mobile phones will be banned from alcohol-free pubs and public spaces. The official language will be Cantonese.

Paul HalesEditorThinq

WHATEVER YOU WANT

...with advances in screen technology meaning special glasses are a thing of the past, 3D will be the norm.

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If we’ve learned anything from trying to predict developments in the technology market over the past 20 years, it’s that the rate of progress often happens faster than many of us expect.

But while flying cars and hover-boots will still be a pipe dream in 2020, it’s reasonable to assume that much-touted breakthroughs such as cheap, flexible screens and glasses-free 3D displays will finally be a reality, and they’ll have a big impact on all levels of computing.

The Holy Grail of mobile computing will be a device with multiple screens that can be employed as traditional computer displays, keyboards or e-book readers, meaning we’ll only have to carry one device with us at all times. Furthermore, a user-centric approach to computing will ensure we no longer have to choose between different platforms for software, music or newspaper subscriptions. We’ll be able to access whatever we want, whenever we want – all funded by micropayments that ensure the cost of computing is far lower than today.

And with advances in screen technology meaning special glasses are a thing of the past, 3D will be the norm for movies, computer games and communication. The screen you’ll be staring at in 2020 will make today’s displays seem as archaic as the big beige boxes of the ‘90s.

Paul Trotter Editor In ChiefPC Advisor

ART OF THE POSSIBLE

... smarter and smarter mobile devices and higher-capacity mobile networks.

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The big questions raging in 2020 will come down to various views on one key issue: how companies can effectively take advantage of a huge explosion in technology-driven possibilities.

Over the next 10 years, the “art of the possible” – in terms of how IT can support business will expand dramatically. Here are some examples: augmented reality (the ability to automatically superimpose data about people, places, products onto our view of these things, through on-device cameras and wearable cameras); smarter and smarter mobile devices and higher-capacity mobile networks; ever more networked goods, infrastructure and assets; and real-time decision-making systems. When you put all these things together, the core challenge for IT in business comes down not to managing scarce and expensive resources (which is what IT teams in business tried to do from the 1960s to the 1990s), but effectively navigating massive arrays of potential choices, each with its own benefi ts and challenges.

Companies’ ability to succeed in this context will depend on their ability to address three big challenges: managing access to technology skills; delivering effective IT governance and portfolio management; and managing key business processes and information as true business assets.

Neil Ward-DuttonFounderMWD Advisors

THE CHANGING

ROLE OF THE CIO

The CIO role will evolve to become increasingly operational across the organisation.

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The CIO role will evolve to become increasingly operational across the organisation.

In less than a decade the technology landscape for which CIOs are responsible will have altered dramatically. Many of the trends that will be commonplace in 2020 are already beginning to take shape with bold CIOs in forward-thinking organisations revising their strategies.

In cloud computing, thankfully the clouds will have cleared as hype gives way to genuine implementation. A whole range of technology will be replaced by a utility approach. Outsourcing and cloud will merge to simply become a relationship between the CIO’s organisation and a supplier. With this, the focus will change away from technology and towards delivery. CIOs will strike strategic relationships with organisations that understand the importance of delivering business results. Therefore the technology landscape for which a CIO will be responsible will include managed technology services, outsourced business processes and on-demand services at critical times.

The CIO role will evolve to become increasingly operational across the organisation, with the CIO sitting with various business partners to select the best option for the result required. A CIO’s team will be highly technology and business literate as it takes requests from the CIO and organisation and ensures

the best service and deal are put in place for the required outcome.

End-user interaction with technology will continue to change as tablet and telephony devices merge and the workforce continues its trend towards increased mobility. Younger workers will expect to be tethered to the net at all times on all devices, whilst other members of the workforce may struggle with an inability to disconnect and concentrate.

Mark Chillingworth Editor In ChiefCIO

QUANTUMSOLACE

...there will be 35 zettabytes of data in the world in 2020, a growth rate of 2900% from 1.2ZB in 2010.

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20101.2ZB

202035ZB

In 2020, usability challenges will have disappeared, similarly to how typing courses, seen as essential when home PCs first took off, have done. Usability is not an attribute of software, but rather the ability to use is an attribute of a user. The ubiquity of computing will make all users capable; they will each have a range of devices and access the data they require wherever it is appropriate for their needs. Overly complex applications will fall into disuse and be replaced. As with websites today, the usage of business intelligence applications will be logged so developers can refine the application and constantly improve usability and performance.

Data volumes will still be presenting challenges. IDC forecasts that there will be 35 zettabytes of data in the world in 2020, a growth rate of 2900% from 1.2ZB in 2010. (1,000 petabytes make an exabyte, 1,000 exabytes make a zettabyte). The need to deal with these volumes will spur extensive technology research and development; by 2020 relational database management systems and even columnar- and vector-based databases will have made way for bleeding-edge technologies, such as quantum computing.

The use of predictive analytics to anticipate future behaviour from past trends and current conditions will be far more widespread, going beyond fraud analytics and basket analysis to resource usage, behaviour predictions (from buying to criminal) and even to predict the effects of one-off “black swan” events. We have all the data and in 10 years’ time we’ll be making proper use of it.

Alys WoodwardProgramme Manager for European Business Analytics Markets and Strategies IDC

A SMARTER CORE

While technology continues to evolve, the fundamentals of IT actually change very slowly in a business context. In the year 2020, a lot of what we see will therefore look very familiar. Evolution of industry standards, best practices and business models will have made hosted services a more integral part of the IT landscape, but most corporate IT will still exist in enterprise datacentres and computer rooms. The majority of the infrastructure will be virtualised, however, and ‘utility-style’ resource management will be ‘normal’, with software architectures and licensing reflecting this.

From a delivery perspective, the emphasis will have moved from boxes, devices and applications (that is, things) to users and services (that is, people and the capability they access). On the front end of the equation, developments in networking, devices and standards will support near-ubiquitous access to services from a wide and varied mix of end-points, including personal equipment, and the concept of identity will underpin most security. IT professionals will be responsible for orchestrating internal and external resources to enable, manage and support all of this.

One thing for sure is that in 2020, no one will be talking about ‘the cloud’. The marketing guys will have moved on long before. Meanwhile, mainframes will still be running most of the really important stuff, and perhaps a lot more.

Dale VileManaging DirectorFreeform Dynamics

SORT OF REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING...

SORT OF REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING...

It is often useful to look at future trends through the lens of the consumer. Let’s call him ‘George’. In 2020, George will probably live with his family in an apartment block in a super-hi-rise building with a name that affirms a neo-post-modern focus on aspiration, technology and mobility – ‘Skypad Apartments’, for instance.

George will work a three-hour, three-day week at Spacely Space Sprockets. He rarely needs to be in the office because he can access all the information he needs through a cloud-enabled series of communications devices – from the console in his aerocar to the processor embedded in the family robot maid Rosie. George is married to Jane and they have a son and daughter. These children, Judy and Elroy, belong to Generation Z – a demographic characterised by an inability to understand that a three-day, three-hour week is honest, hard work and, therefore, character-building.

Despite all the labour-saving devices available to George and Jane, they will still complain about how it was better in the old days – often leading to hilarious consequences.

Tom Berry, Head of Consulting Services Bite Communications

Tom Berry Head of Consulting Services, Bite Communications

Nick Booth Technology Columnist, City AM

Mark Chillingworth Editor In Chief, CIO

Neil Ward-DuttonFounder, MWD Advisors

Paul Hales Editor, Thinq

James MurrayEditor, BusinessGreen.com

Paul Trotter Editor In Chief, PC Advisor

Martin VeitchHead of Client Strategy, Bite Communications

Dale Vile Managing Director, Freeform Dynamics

Alys WoodwardProgramme Manager for European Business Analytics Markets and Strategies, IDC

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