RICHMOND HILLS, Ontario – Organizations need to stay on top of eight significant IT issues or trends, contends Jeff Wacker, corporate futurist at EDS.
(1) Short battery life on mobile computing devices is a major impediment to people working in 12 hour shift jobs.
(2) IT applications will increasingly be about ‘context as well as content. An early adopter is Google with its ability to track people’s searches and base its advertising on the choices that are made.
(3) ‘Monolithic’ applications like ERP that prescribe one way to accomplish things are going to be replaced by more SOA based ‘granular’ apps. The later will allow users to use a portion of a solution that fits their needs.
(4) Companies will have to take action on the sophistication and depth of the security violations that will be coming out in 2007. The current focus on perimeter security is not sufficient to ward off external intruders invading a system and manipulating existing internal applications.
(5) More and more small and mid-sized companies will rely on third parties to manage elements of their IT infrastructure requirements.
(6) Simulation technologies that were originally developed in engineering will be used as a backup for decision-making. Human beings face a psychological limitation in terms of how much data they can fully assimilate.
(7) Legacy applications are too expensive to maintain. 85 per cent of corporate IT’s budget involves maintenance. What are EDS sees is movement to a high degree of application modernization and applications rationalization. That is being able to understand and harvest the business rules, of what is actually happening in those old legacy things. But put them in a way that is highly changeable, highly flexible and highly efficient.
(8) Mass marketers like Wal-Mart are suffering because they cannot offer what people individually want. More successful are companies like Amazon, Google and E Bay that provide personalized services. The futurist offers the example of Amazon which automatically knows his book preferences when he goes online.
We are starting to see personalized information systems in places like financial, travel and hospitality.
This column was written by Paul Weinberg of eChannelline.
