Plenum Edmund Thompsonpdf

Strategic Technologies for 2006 and 2016

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Page 1Ed Thompson, Gartner

© 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

Agenda

1. What are the top 10 technologies an IT professional needs to know about in 2006?

2. What are the most disruptive trends and most significant opportunities arising from emerging information technology for 2016?




AJAX Real-time DW Grid Open SourceWiMAX EIM Portals iSCSI SANsIP Telephony Utility Computing Instant Messaging BluetoothNanocomputing XBRL UWB Personal Search ZigBee Ontologies Virtualization Mobile Applications Microcommerce Natural Language Search Micro Fuel Cells e-InkSpeech Recognition Pervasive Computing 802.11g Trusted PlatformsOLED/LEP Wikis Mesh Networks SOATablet PCs Information Extraction IT Self Service 4G Wireless Semantic Web Unified Communications Smart Dust Camera Phones Collective Intelligence Smart Phones Mashup Composite

Conclusion: Top 10 Technologies 2006

MainstreamVirtualizationGrid ComputingService Oriented ArchitectureEnterprise Information MgtOpen SourcePersonal Search

Important Long Range TrendsWeb 2.0 — AJAXWeb 2.0 Mashup Composite ModelCollective IntelligencePervasive computing

Technology Trigger

Peak of Inflated Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment

Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

Visibility

+

This presentation highlights important technologies that should be tracked, and which represent major trends. In the next 18 to 36 months, we will see the risks of early adoption more-clearly identified and reduced. Most of these technologies exist in some form already, but have become suitable for a wider range of uses. In certain cases we will split potential uses into categories, only some of which will become mature in this time frame. By focusing on those categories that will be appropriate for exploitation, high value can be extracted from the technology without waiting for the full and final maturation of all its aspects and applications. An example from software-as-services is the applicability of Web services internally, while cross-enterprise deployments may have to wait for the maturation of authentication and security standards. This view of maturity is based on the Gartner concept of the Hype Cycle — that every technology and new idea is subject to distinct phases in its progress, from first elucidation to widespread market adoption. The cycle moves from the trigger or disclosure up to a Peak of Inflated Expectations, as the concept is widely discussed. Once actual use begins, the early adopters discover issues and incur failures — demonstrating that the appropriate use was poorly understood. The bad news drives an overreaction to the Trough of Disillusionment, until the real results can be sorted into best practices, pitfalls and so forth. The outcome is a climb to maturity where the new concept is well understood — in terms of what it can do and how best it should be implemented.




Virtualization Strategies

Teleportation

Dice and slice

Aggregate

Interposing technology that masks the physical nature and boundaries of resources from resource users.

Virtualization can create some form of container that holds a workload — this can be an entire simulated server, as in a virtual partition, or it can be a portion of an OS instance. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. These containers decouple the needs of the workload inside the container from the boundaries of the physical assets in the data center. A virtual machine monitor or hypervisor can "dice and slice", making one physical box appear to be many smaller machines, each a container. The user is free to run independent operating systems and applications in each container. Some container technology permits "teleportation" — the movement of the container from one physical box to another — while the OS and workload inside the container continue along without disruption. Other container technology will permit a container to span multiple physical boxes. This is called "aggregation", where the workload runs as if on a single big box under one OS, but is accessing the resources of multiple discrete machines. Dice and slice is the most common technique today, found in hardware partitions and all hypervisors or virtual machine monitors. Teleportation and aggregation are more recent arrivals that are rapidly entering the marketplace.




Grid ComputingApplication

Owner COwner A Owner B

Grid computing has become an over-hyped term. Major vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP and Gateway have grid initiatives. There are many start-ups that assert a connection with grid. According to some people, grid will greatly boost the efficiency of existing resources, enable a revolution in the use of computers, and so forth — all the hyperbole that is characteristic of the Peak of Inflated Expectations on the Hype Cycle. Because the term has such cachet, it will increasingly be added to marketing brochures and slide presentations, often with only minor justification.Grid computing was developed in the scientific and technical computing fields as a continuation of decades of work to increase parallelism and create larger virtual computers than the actual servers that are affordable, or even achievable, with present technology. Big challenges, such as testing every possible compound to find candidates to block smallpox or cancer, are addressed by a grid.Basically, a large problem is addressed by an application that can be divided into many semiautonomous parts. The parts are then shipped to run on many separate computers. If all the computers are owned by one entity, this is a computer cluster. It becomes a grid when there are potentially multiple owners of the pool of computers used.Action Item: Look for large-scale technical, scientific and engineering applications that may be suitable for exploiting grid technology.

Strategic Planning Assumption: Grid computing within commercial organizations will be used mainly for computationally intensive workloads through 2007 (0.8 probability).




Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Moving From Theory to Practice

New Business Process

Business Services Repository

Experience

Process Services

SOA/SODA Framework

Integration Runtime APS/ESB

Information Management

Analysis, Testing, Performance

Managem

ent

Secu

rity

SOA Disruptions

QoS

Control

Distribution

Definition

Interop

Measurement

Life Cycle

SecuritySkills

Governance BPP Building Blocks

SOA capabilities provide value through the cost-effective use of information assets, and emphasize the construction of dynamic composite chains of loosely coupled applications to reflect real-time business conditions. Service-oriented business applications (SOBAs) are built on SOA and use the service-oriented development of applications (SODA) — that is, development time concepts that leverage reuse and dynamic binding. Building applications on SOA is more than an applications development (AD) benefit — it makes changes broader, easier and less expensive, even across organizational boundaries and among organizations. The quick development of composite SOBAs will be a key SOA activity. The incorporation of, and the ability to work with, Web services standards (including BPEL, SOAP and WSDL) is a key characteristic of SOBA. Event-driven architectures are also relevant, because Web services and the standards that define them will enable companies to increase their sensitivity and response to significant changes in their service environments.Action Item: SOBAs offer real-time SOA benefits that will enable emerging business-critical processes in the next decade. Prepare for next-generation application deployment.The Business Process Platform requires a set of technologies that includes user experience, processes design, application integration, information management and a SOA/SODA framework. These tools are available today on an individual basis, but to deliver the consistent and controlled composition environment required by business users, these tools must be integrated and wrapped with security, management, analysis, testing and performance tools. This integrated toolset, plus management tools, also has to be integrated into the business services repository. Only then can sophisticated business users or business architects visually build a new business process and then select from content to build or compose new applications that model differentiated business processes. Vendors of applications, application infrastructure, application development, and information management technology are beginning to expandtheir offerings outward to include multiple components of this integrated toolset. User Advice: To enable "user-oriented" business process composition, you will need to acquire an integrated toolset that includes security and management capabilities.

Strategic Planning Assumptions: By 2007, infrastructure and business application vendors will offer pre-integrated frameworks to build (or assemble) composition applications (0.8 probability). By 2008, SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of new development projects, and will enable organizations to increase code reuse by more than 100 percent (0.8 probability).




As the march toward service-oriented architecture (SOA) continues, a focus on information architecture is required. SOA is about extreme decoupling — decoupling data from process, application from interface and application from server. Accordingly, the success of SOA depends on knowing where information is (strategic management of metadata), how to connect to it (data integration platform), and the authoritative sources of information (master data management). SOA demands more from information architecture than previous development approaches. An agile company needs EIM.Building an SOA without an EIM strategy will significantly lower the response to business process choreography. One of the main benefits of SOBAs will be lost. Developing Web services and SOBA will be more expensive because each point will have to verify semantics, requiring more development time and money. The alternative is to remove the function whereby the semantics being referenced are checked. This can be done by creating a single semantic blanket company-wide, so that when a new service or application stack is added, the semantics are already assured and managed by the blanket. This removes the overhead at the service level but adds a cost for the blanket. More importantly, the required level of agility, the flexibility in being able to assemble and reassemble process through dynamic orchestration, can be achieved. An EIM layer across all repositories accessed by SOBAs will mean that service choreography can operate faster because it doesn't have to worry about semantics.Action Item: Develop an enterprise information management system to complement your SOA initiatives.

Enterprise Information Management:A Necessary Compliment to SOA

Strategic Planning Assumptions: Through 2007, 20 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will deploy an enterprise-level EIM strategy in support of an SOA (0.7 probability). Through 2008, those organizations that adopt EIM will increase their chances of success in SOA by 70 percent (0.8 probability).




SugarCRM, Compiere, OhioedgeEnterprise Applications

Zope, phpBB, Nukes, PostNukeCollaboration

Midgard, OpenCms, Lenya, TYPO3, Red HatContent Management

Jetspeed, Gluecode, Zope, uPortal, LiferayPresentation

Lucene, ht://DigSearch

OpenFlowProcess Management

Eclipse, NetBeans, PHP, Perl, Struts, Hibernate, SpringDevelopment Tools

JBoss, JOnAS, Application Servers

openadaptorIntegration Services

OpenLDAPDirectory Services

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, IngresRDBMS

Linux, FreeBSDOperating System

The Open-Source Stacks: Growing Up

Enterprise Service Bus

Virtualization Xen

Security

Celtix, ServiceMix

Snort, Nessus

Products Maturity

The success or failure of a product depends to a large extent on its "alignment" with successful — or otherwise — products and technologies that together are available as a coherent platform or solution. This is an important differentiator for mainstream knowledge workplace products that are aligned with the solution strategies of successful platform vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.The technology aggregation trend, which caused the rise of mainstream application platform suites and smart enterprise suite offerings, is also operating on open-source products. Many open-source products for the knowledge workplace — highlighted above — depend on, and even include, other open-source infrastructure servers and development tools as part of their distributions. As other open-source infrastructure pieces become mature and dependable, they serve as building blocks on which to base more-user-focused technology and services (typically relevant to the knowledge workplace). There is evidence that the cross-fertilization of different development efforts is accelerating overall development.Today, OSS is maturing in many levels of the software "stack". Increasing numbers of IT organizations are finding open source to be a valid, cost-effective choice in many aspects of software infrastructure markets.

Strategic Planning Assumptions: By 2008, OSS solutions will directly compete with closed-source products in all software infrastructure markets (0.8 probability). By 2010, mainstream IT organizations will consider OSS in 80 percent of their infrastructure-focused software investments (0.7 probability).




Basic Access

IntegratedSearch

ExpandedSearch

Desktop SearchApplication Data

Images, Video, Audio

Corporate DataBacklinking

"Techno-forager"

Role-Based Access Social Networks

Chronological ContextLocation

• Capability• Complexity• Storage

Moving From Search to Navigation

Contextual Navigation

Adaptive

Access

Discrete

"Find"

File SystemApp-Specific

Search Engine

Automation

Personal

Management

Information access is moving from discrete individual searches, often done in the context of an individual application, to a rich, integrated world where users navigate through a sea of linked information. Ultimately, interpretable information of all kinds will find its way into searchable environments. However, searches alone will not be enough to provide "meaningful" results. Classification or modeling of the information to be searched for and returned (for example, using ontologies) will also be needed to return rational results, and not just to reach all the possible sources. The application of techniques such asbacklink analysis provides more context to the search. In the future, contextual navigation will expand, as social networks and knowledge of the user's role and current "state" in a business process are used to provide context for a particular request for information. As the world of information access evolves, the emphasis will shift from personal empowerment to the management of information access. Information access management is driven by the enterprise's need to have more control over information access (for example, who has access under what conditions). Management of the search environment, including the ability to limit a search based on defined rules (personal or enterprise), will help address the considerable enterprise security and personal privacy issues. In the longer term, the emphasis will shift to the automation of search/navigation. In an automated world, the system proactively examines personal preferences, the business process activity being performed, and other contexts to proactively serve up information that might be of value. In its ultimate incarnation, this would lead us to the world of intelligent agents and digital assistants.Adaptive access provides secure, managed, role/context-based linkage to business processes (aka "applications"), information and other users, from any location, by any user with any device, across any connection with the appropriate information/application delivery model and user interface.




Web 2.0: Naming the Wave

Business

Technology & Architecture

Community

Long-tail economics

User-created content:

Collective intelligence

Ajax RSS

Open interfaces: WS*, REST, POX P2P

Mashup syndication

Remix/ Mashups

Customer/community participation

Platforms & protocols, not products

User-created applications

User-created metadata

Collaborative creation

Explicit community ratings

Web service-enabled business models

Micropayments

Revenue sharing

Web 2.0 refers to recent trends in the technology and business of the Web. It is loosely defined by the following attributes, only some of which (such as lightweight technology leading to rich user interfaces) are new:• Greater user participation — User-generated data and metadata and user-centric designs• Openness — Transparent processes, open application programming interfaces (APIs), and open-source software and content• Lightweight rather than heavyweight technology — Scripting languages, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-based user interfaces, representational state transfer (REST)-based interaction protocol, RSS-based syndication and HTML-based microformats• Decentralized, distributed process — Ad hoc "mashups" of Web sites building on public APIs; bottom-up, bazaar-style development; and content tagged by locally defined "folksonomies"Action Item: Prepare for greater use of Web 2.0 technologies (such as Ajax, RSS, REST and microformats). But remember that technologies are not definitional, and they are not a long-lasting source of competitive advantage. What is new and challenging is the social dimension.

Strategic Imperative: In a Web 2.0 world, it's the ecosystem, not the enterprise, that the IT function needs to serve.




AJAX Rich Clients …Only The Beginning

AJAX XHTML + CSS + DOM + XHTTPRequest

Offline AJAXEmerging topic

Open AJAXIBM-led initiative

Related InitiativesMicrosoft LiveIBM Workplace http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/?p=2

AJAX enables browser-based applications to have the interactive look and feel of desktop applications. JavaScript embedded in the Web page handles input from the user, and instead of fetching a complete new page, uses XMLHTTPRequest to fetch some data (usually in XML format) and then render it on the current Web page by updating the DOM (Document Object Model). This can be done quickly enough with today's high-speed Internet connections to deliver surprisingly responsive interfaces.Rich Internet application (RIA) technology in general, and AJAX technology in particular, can provide substantial improvements in user experience that result in measurable business value. However, the benefits are not automatic, and depend as much on changes to development processes, and on an awareness of usability-centered design issues, as they do on technology such as AJAX.Organizations that incorporate AJAX into their Web development projects must select from four levels: 1) Snippet-level — code fragments that can be easily folded into existing applications; 2) Widget-level — self-contained user interface components that can be bolted on; 3) Framework-level — a comprehensive framework that requires a rewrite of the front end; and 4) Back-end-integrated — a framework with substantial linkage to back-end systems. All represent worthwhile choices for an organization, but each has unique risks, rewards and trade-offs, and none can be considered the single strategic choice. The Open AJAX initiative, led by IBM, is designed to bolster Eclipse's standing as one of the two main IDEs (along with Microsoft's Visual Studio). Open-source software (OSS) is highlighted, with Eclipse, Mozilla and several OSS AJAX toolkits (Dojo, openrico, Zimbra and others still to come) playing a prominent role. Wider participation is needed for Open AJAX to become strategic. So far there is no attempt to standardize toolkits, only the connection to the IDE. AJAX-enabled Eclipse seems lightweight compared with offerings from AJAX-focused vendors. Over time, Gartner expects to see a richer technology layer between Eclipse and the toolkits. Users should expect significant evolution in these models through 2010, as the Web model matures to embrace rich and complex client environments. AJAX represents only one part of an evolving distributed Web model that takes advantage of rich client capabilities and deals with sporadically connected and offline use cases. Other initiatives, such as Microsoft Live and IBM Workplace, also attempt to provide managed environments assuming more robust client software.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2008, AJAX-style GUIs will be the dominant style for RIA (Rich Internet Application) interfaces (0.8 probability).




Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2008, Web mashups will be the dominant model for the creation of composite enterprise applications (0.7 probability).

Mashups: Composite Model for Opportunistic/Situational Applications

Google Maps + Fandango =

Mashmap.com

Google Maps + Salesforce.com = smashforce

A mashup is a Web site or Web application that combines content from multiple sources into a single integrated presentation. A mashup uses a variety of public interfaces, including APIs, Web service calls, JavaScripts and Web feeds (e.g., RSS, Atom) to source the content. The term was inspired by a similar use of the expression in pop music, where it refers to the practice of creating a new song by assembling purloined parts of other existing songs. A rich community is growing on the Web, experimenting with mashups based on eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo! APIs.Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! offer map-based APIs that have resulted in mashups of data and geography that in turn drive traffic and advertising. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides access to its platform and product data and, as of 4Q 2005, reportedly has more than 120,000 developers and over 975,000 active seller accounts (those that have sold at least one item in the previous year), with many using AWS. Third-party sellers generated $490 million in 2Q 2005, which accounts for 28 percent of Amazon's unit sales (up from 24 percent in 2Q 2004).




Web Platform APIs — A Partial List411sync - SMS messaging Amazon - Online retailer, search, queuing serviceAmphetaRate - News aggregator Backpack - Online information manager BBC - Multimedia archive database Blogger - Blogging services Bloglines - Online feed aggregator Buzznet - Photo sharing CDYNE - Data delivery services cPath - Medical database lookupCreative Commons - Licensing engine integration Data On Call - Fax servicesdel.icio.us - Social bookmarking Digital Podcast - Podcast search eBay - Online marketplace EVDB - Events database FedEx - Package shipping FeedBurner - Blog promotion tracking service FeedMap - Blog geo-coding Findory - Personalized news aggregation Flickr - Photo-sharing service Freedb/CDDB - Online CD catalog service geocoder - Geographic lookup services Gigablast - Search service Google - Adwords, advertising, search, maps

GraphMagic - Graph and chart services Internet Archive - Non-profit Internet library JotSpot - Wiki-style collaboration toolsLibrary of Congress SRW - Information search Microsoft - Mapping (MapPoint, Virtual Earth)NASA - Satellite mapping images NCBI Entrez - Life sciences search services NewsGator - Feed aggregationNOAA Weather Service - Weather forecast database PayPal - Online payments Plazes - Location discovery service Skype - VoIP softwareStrikeIron - Web services marketplaceTagalag - Email tagging Tagyu Tag - Recommendation service Technorati - Blog search Telcontar - Location-based servicesTrekmail - Messaging services TypeKey - Authentication framework Upcoming.org - Collaborative event calendar UPS - Package shipping Yahoo! - Ads, ad mgt, maps, search, shoppingZipCodes - Zip code lookup serviceZvents - Events ecosystem

Amazon Simple Queue Service (summarized from Amazon.com Web services site)Amazon Simple Queue Service (Beta) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components. Using the Simple Queue Service (SQS), developers can decouple components of their application so that they run independently. SQS provides the message management between the independent components. Any component of a distributed application can store any type of data in a reliable queue at Amazon.com. Another component or application can retrieve the data using queue semantics. The system is intended to reduce the costs associated with resolving the producer-consumer problem in distributed application development. It is specifically designed for use by distributed applications. A single queue can be used simultaneously by many distributed application components. There is no need for components to coordinate with each other to enable them to share a queue. A configurable read-lock feature is included to lower the incidence of duplicate messages when two applications are concurrently reading from the same queue. StrikeIron (summarized from Strikeiron.com)The StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace includes all the StrikeIron Web Services and "StrikeIron Marketplace Powered Web Services" from other providers. All the Web services in the StrikeIron Marketplace are sold through StrikeIron and have distinct advantages, such as availability of simplified sign-on, simplified billing and accounting, flexible pricing alternatives, and integrated tools and services to accelerate their utilization. StirkeIron's capabilities include: commerce, communications, computers, content databases, entertainment, finance, general business, government, human resources, marketing, multimedia, news, reference, sales, sports, supply chain, transportation and utilities.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2008, Web services best practice will have shifted away from ad hoc approaches to accessing and updating stateful resources to a uniform approach based on a small set of state management operations (0.8 probability).




ApplicationsToll pass systemsPet identificationAccess cardsRetail theft protectionImproved asset controlReal-time retail-shelf inventoryImprove manufacturing and supply-chain efficiencyAfter-sale service offerings

Photo source: Texas Instruments

RFID — Beyond Bar CodesRead while covered or movingScan at a distanceSurvives water, heat, paintingPrice dropping to low levelsCan remain in product for lifePrivacy issues must be solved

Pervasive Computing —RFID Tags and Mesh Networks

Mesh NetworksLow-power CPUOn-chip wireless

Ad hoc networking algorithms

May be self-powered

On-chip sensors (such as MEMS)

The use of RFID tags has been relatively low and at a steep price premium compared with bar coding or other marking methods. Usage will continue to increase rapidly as the advantages of this technology over bar codes are exploited. Volume increases beget cost reductions, fueling further expansion of the technology to lower value and higher volumes of tracked items. During the remainder of this decade, the costs will decline to the point where RFID will become ubiquitous in supply chains, retailing and manufacturing environments.Tags embedded in products, as opposed to packaging, enable life-of-the-product tracking and in-depth identification of the history and state of each product instance. Clever businesses will develop value-added services, based on RFID information, that can be offered to generate incremental profit from customers during a product's life. Receiving, warehousing, distribution and retail will gain speed and cost advantages from RFID. To gain these advantages, new investments will have to be made in systems and tools, moderating the adoption rate."Mesh network" is a broad term describing wireless networks in which a node can relay signals via several other nodes. In a sensor network, each mesh node includes, or is connected to, a sensor of some type. Examples include temperature, vibration or pressure sensors. Some vendors produce small nodes with a battery life of several years. Mesh networks offer several potential advantages for industrial and military M2M applications, including low installation cost, scalability and resilience.Action Item: Evaluate the potential advantages of RFID tags for high-value objects, new services and sharp improvements in efficiency; as costs decrease, broaden the investigation to a wider set of uses.

Strategic Planning Assumptions: By 2012, radio frequency identification (RFID) and similar wireless chips will evolve from supply-chain technologies into enablers of value-added consumer applications, such as item location and status reporting. By 2012, RFID tags will add mesh network capabilities (0.6 probability).Tactical Guideline: Type A organizations that need to carry out simple sensing in inaccessible locations should conduct trials of sensor networks in 2006.




Networked Collective IntelligenceA Different Kind of Problem Solving

Large Scale

Open Participation

Diverse and Distributed

Ad hoc & Small Contributions

Incremental Improvement

Independent(little or no interaction)

Self-Selection

Aggregation Mechanisms

Common/Diffused Ownership

Shared infrastructure; near-symmetrical communication rates

P2P Networks (e.g., Skype, BitTorrent)

Software creationOpen-Source Development

Popularity-based ratings; collaborative filtering

Shop Recommendation Engines (e.g., Amazon)

Locate, buy, rate expertsExpert Syndication (e.g., InnoCentive)

Rate, buy/sell ideas/opinionsPrediction Markets (NewsFutures, Foresight Exchange)

Use hyperlinks as ratingsSearch results relevance (Google)

Label Weblogs, bookmarks, pictures, content...

Folksonomies (e.g., Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr)

Seller/buyer/product ratingseBay, Epinions, Yahoo!,...

Collaborative spam detection and filtering

Spam Filtering Network (Razor)Image classificationNASA Clickworker Project

User-created Web-wide directoryDirectories (e.g., Open Directory Project)

Unrestricted editorial acess using a wikiContent Creation (e.g., Wikipedia.org)

NCI TechniqueDomain

Communities are the basis of society and work. Traditional communities tended to be based on relatively long-lived social groupings, such as families, employment or team membership. However, technology has enabled many new types of community, as well as new ways for communities to collaborate. Organizations can take advantage of technology-enabled communities and collaboration by, for example:

• Extending their enterprise boundaries to new sources of talent, even for their core competencies (for example, through "bounty" sites, such as InnoCentive and TopCoder).

• Looking for implicit patterns and information in data created as a side effect of networked interactions, such as Google's link analysis to determine Web site quality.

• Identifying relevant contributors in real time (for example, through expertise location).During the next decade, collaboration will rise above the radar screen for many corporations, which will observe, manage, monitor and measure, and archive collaboration as a corporate resource.Action Item: Look for opportunities not just to support collaboration and in-house communities, but also to exploit broader communities enabled or identified by technology.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2010, 80 percent of Internet-connected individuals will knowingly or unknowingly participate in some NCI activity (0.7 probability).




Agenda

1. What are the top 10 technologies an IT professional needs to know about in 2006?

2. What are the most disruptive trends and most significant opportunities arising from emerging information technology for 2016?




Help Yourself

Seamless ServiceOperating across automated and live channels

"Secret" ServiceUnseen human in the loop

Service AvoidanceAutomation, communities

Self-SufficiencyDeeper involvement in product definition/ service resolution

Customer Intent-DrivenProactively addressing customers' goals

Since 2001, many organizations have continued a strong focus on self-service, including creating seamless service experiences across multiple interaction channels. A few have introduced "secret" service models, in which human agents support the automated systems where they fall short, often without the customer knowing that there is a human in the loop. Finding alternate ways to solve a customer's problem is also a key goal — for example, by automating problem diagnosis and resolution, or by creating communities of customers who can help each other. Future directions include a drive toward helping the growing body of smart, informed customers become more self-sufficient through services such as "design your own credit card" in which customers can explicitly trade off interest rates against loyalty points and the amount of the annual fee. This is part of a broader trend toward understanding and delivering to a customer's intent (for example, does this customer want to travel somewhere as quickly as possible, or as cheaply as possible?), which involves balancing the intentions that the business has for the customer with the most likely intentions that the customer has for the business.Action Item: Reevaluate organizational processes to explicitly address the context of the customer relationship and each interaction within that relationship.

2001 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2007, more than 30 percent of contact center personnel will be dedicated to providing "secret" customer service (that is, invisible to the customer) as part of an automated customer interface (0.6 probability).

2006 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2010, 15 percent of organizations will move to intent-driven customer strategies (0.7 probability).




2001 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2008, a new billion-dollar industry will emerge, based on collecting, organizing and selling tags as a distinct commodity (0.6 probability).

2006 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2015, specific industries (for example, healthcare, insurance, marketing) will create a billion dollars of additional revenue through automated discovery of new attributes (0.6 probability).

Tagging the World: New Sources and Types of Information Attribute

TechniquesText analysisLink analysisPeer taggingSemantic markupContent mining

ItemsText, imagesAudio, videoProducts, servicesPeoplePlaces

AttributesTopic

QualityStatus

LocationAffinity

Key TrendsGrowth of tagging marketplacesAutomated discovery of new attributes

+

In 2001, Gartner featured a trend concerning the rise of information tags that described attributes of an item (such as content, services, people, locations) . The trend focused on the information content rather than on physical tags such as radio frequency identification (RFID). The trend highlighted the increase in automated techniques to create information tags (for example, quality, topic) and the growth of a "feedback society" in which individuals contributed their own perspectives rather than leaving things to the professionals.A recent surge in online tagging services (such as digg.com, Flickr and del.icio.us) has pushed this trend into the foreground, and we predict further traction and applicability of this phenomenon. The availability of tagged items on such a massive scale will lead to new capabilities (for example, machine learning techniques for image recognition). In addition, the routine collection and automated analysis of new data types (such as location, proximity) will lead to the identification of new types of attribute (for example, the "entropy" of a person — see MIT's Reality Mining project at http://reality.media.mit.edu/).Action Item: Identify opportunities to better understand and target customers and to optimize service offerings based on attributes that are available through mass peer tagging or that can be automatically discovered and assigned.




Community as Core Competency

New marketplacesScientific Discovery InnoCentive Financial Services ProsperProduct designThreadlessMicroservicesAmazon Mturk

Collective IntelligenceOpen-source, WikipediaPrediction marketsTagging

Extend your organization by using, or being, the new marketplaces

Leverage implicitcontributions: buying, linking, clicking, searching

Use the power of scale to solve old problems in new ways

Leverage lead users to help drive innovation

Technology has enabled many new types of communities, as well as new ways for communities to collaborate, which in turn has created new sources of information and new styles of creation. Organizations can take advantage of technology-enabled communities by:• Extending their enterprise boundaries to new sources of talent, even for their core competencies — for example, through "bounty" sites, such as InnoCentive and TopCoder• Using networked collective intelligence to leverage small contributions from a broad community of motivated, self-selecting contributors• Taking advantage of the massive scale of worldwide network connectivity to trigger new approaches to difficult problems• Identifying and leveraging "lead users" (see "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel) who can contribute in a major way to design innovationAction Item: Take advantage of new types of community interaction that can extend your enterprise and its creative processes.

2001 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2010, 70 percent of the population in developed nations will spend 10 times longer per day interacting with people in the e-world than in the physical one (0.6 probability).2006 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2015, more than 100 leading companies will have made or saved at least $10 million due to collective intelligence (0.6 probability).




Applications Shift From Pre-Canned Logic to Dynamic Assemblies

SOA, EDA, BPM, BPP,SODA/ISE,

composite applications,reuse, metadata, MDA

Driven By

ApplicationMonoliths,Black orOpaqueBoxes

Shifts to

Well-Defined, Atomic Functional Components and Processes

BPP, SODA/ISE,metadata, portals Driven By

User Tailored

for Custom Fit

Shifts toVendor

Design for Mass-

Market Fit

BAM, RTI, BPA,BPM, rules engines,

composite applications,Web 2.0

Driven ByShifts to

Optimizing the Efficiency of the Process

Optimizing the Agility of the Process

A critical shift in the concept of "application" is under way. Once end users stopped creating all their own monolithic applications, applications became vendor-constructed monoliths — mass-market-focused bundles of black-boxed functionality, delivered on a vendor-specified release schedule. With the advent of new technical capabilities (for example, integrated service environment [ISE], business process management suite and real-time infrastructure [RTI]) and new architectural models (such as service-oriented architecture [SOA] and event-driven architecture [EDA]), the application is being re-cast. The black box of monolithic business logic is being cracked open, exposing access to smaller components or services (for example, SOA-based). Each of these components or services is able to participate in a larger "composition" of application logic using business process management (BPM) and ISE/service-oriented development of applications (SODA) process-centric concepts, driven by needs unanticipated by the original creator or vendor. Vendor-mandated and vendor-delivered upgrades are being replaced by change based on systems-level and application-level feedback derived from monitoring and performance information offered by business activity monitoring (BAM), RTI, business process analysis (BPA) and BPM. The overarching shift is one of increased agility for the end users, and a de-emphasis of the traditional, pre-defined application as an entity in its own right.

2001 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2005, the use of Web services will herald the rise of peer-to-peer service consumer/producer relationships (0.8 probability).

2006 Definition: "Application" shifts from being "what you buy" to "what you do with the software assets under your control, whether homegrown or purchased."




Real World Web Behavior-based Pricing ModelsUsage, risk

Augmented RealityContext-based information at point of decision/action

Unifying Digital and Physical Worlds

Smart Objects and PackagingKnow identity, location, owner, history, safety, environment …

Real-World Web TechnologiesWireless communicationsSensor networksObject identificationLocation identificationAttribute tags

Increasingly, real-world objects will not only contain local processing capabilities due to the falling size and cost of microprocessors, but they will also be able to interact with their surroundings through sensing and networking capabilities. The emergence of this real-world Web will bring the power of the Web, which today is perceived as a "separate" virtual place, to the user's point of need of information or transaction. Companies will be able to take advantage of ongoing connectivity — for example, delivering product safety or recall alerts or additional services even after products have been provided to customers. They will also capitalize on the potential for new pricing models, such as location tracking for insurance or hourly car rental. Augmented reality will allow the user's view of the real world to be supplemented with relevant information, such as context-specific text or graphics delivered to a heads-up display or mobile device, or audio information delivered to a headset. Electronic devices and other consumer products may also introduce "sociable" attributes, such as recognizing their owner and determining when they are being held. Action Item: Identify applications in which decisions can be improved by delivering context-specific information to mobile workers or customers.

2001 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2007, more than 60 percent of the population will carry or wear a wireless computing and communications device at least six hours a day, and by 2010, more than 75 percent will do so (0.6 probability).2006 Strategic Planning Assumption: The volume of real-time information reaching urban consumers will increase tenfold by 2015 (0.7 probability).




The Experience Is the Computer

Ambient intelligence: off the desktop and into the world

More-diverse user populations

Display advances:large screen, e-paper

Alternate inputs: digitalpen, speech, touch

Truly mobile devices:vehicles, robots

Devices integrate information from many sources to create contextual and sociable user experience

2010

2015

2020

GUI remains dominant

Focus shifts from interfaces for devices to a proactive UI framework for the environment

Although little has changed in the dominant user interface paradigm — the graphical user interface (GUI) — for nearly 20 years, a number of technology advances will start to change the interface landscape by 2010. Large-screen displays will drop in price, and low-cost screen digitizers and OS support (Windows Vista) for pen interfaces will make the pen input and touch screens more prevalent. Mobile phones and music players will incorporate contextual knowledge about owners, profiles, locations and so forth. Starting at about 2010, devices will integrate information from many sources to deliver an integrated and sociable user experience.After 2015, the so-called desktop will flow off of the desk and into office appliances and the walls around the user. In this world of ambient intelligence, any nontrivial device will contain some degree of embedded processing and communications capability. In this new environment, the focus shifts from interfaces on individual devices to an "environmental user interface," acting as a contextual user access and information delivery engine across multiple interconnected devices.Action Item: Be ready for major shifts in the 2010 to 2015 time frame, but focus investment on specific applications with quantifiable value, such as digital pens to speed access to captured data.

Strategic Planning Assumptions: By 2015, the improvement in the productivity of information workers that can be attributed to increased display screen workspace will exceed 20 percent (0.6 probability).

By 2015, the focus of user interfaces (UIs) will shift from designing individual interfaces for devices to creating a proactive UI framework for the environment (0.6 probability).




Unbundling Business Processes:Connectivity + Granularity = Opportunity

Simple Tasks

Complex Tasks

Established B2B, B2C, C2C

Connectivity

More Granular IT Architecture (SOA)

Transfer of Responsibility

More Granular Business Architectures (distributed

workforce, BPM)

New Products and Services

DistributeCall centerHelp desk

EliminateRe-keying data

AutomateCredit checkRFID tag read

Self-serviceOnline purchasesAirport kiosksSelf-checkoutVoice response

MicrocontentRing tonesiTunes Articles

Collective IntelligenceCreationClassification Quality ratingPrediction

OutsourceCall centerHelp desk

MicroservicesTaxi dispatchParking reservationDelivery

Emerging Opportunities

One of the most significant high-level trends driven by IT is the ability to address all kinds of business problems — interactions, transactions, tasks, processes, applications, relationships — at a much smaller level of granularity than has been possible in the past. The modularity of service-oriented architecture, together with digital infrastructures for B2B and B2C commerce, are decreasing the cost and increasing the ability of breaking apart traditional processes into smaller chunks, which can then be reexamined to optimize their delivery options.Emerging opportunities are arising, in particular, from the ability to let consumers take on more responsibility for activities that have traditionally been performed by companies. The first of these were the self-service applications that eliminated the need for a customer service representative through self-service kiosks and check-outs. We anticipate the next round to be focused on specialized activities that can be packaged in such a way that they can be conducted either by customers (for example, equipment diagnosis) or others in the supply chain (for example, a repair shop performing a claims adjustment).

Strategic Imperative: Examine how the smaller granularity of tasks and interactions will provide you with more flexibility in internal processes and external relationships.




The Rise of Long-Tail Business

Increased Reach of Consumers:Search, affinity, community

Increased Reach of Businesses:Lower cost of targeted advertisingMore granular services

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Number of Products*

Blockbusters Less Dominant

Mass customizationAdvertisement must account for new realitiesNew products become economicalMore choice drives more competition

Number of Products

Niche/Long-Tail Business

Blockbusters

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In many retail disciplines, the 80-20 rule governed for a long while — approximately 20 percent of the products received approximately 80 percent of the revenue. This was due to limited shelf and display space and the high marketing costs for a few widely popular channels. Now, the growth of the online channel is changing this. Consumers have dramatically more reach and flexibility online through much-improved search engines and discovery mechanisms (for example, collaborative filtering on Amazon and Netflix, and location-based search on Google and Yahoo). Consumers can now tap into myriad virtual communities, while the TV industry also moves into quasi-on-demand with personal recording devices. The resulting fragmentation means more choice and less dominance of a few channels. In addition, the Web will increasingly provide an unlimited amount of (potentially personalized) shelf space, removing physical constraints. Publication costs are also decreasing, allowing small vendors to make themselves heard in the appropriate corners of the Web (through context- and content-based advertisements). This will not only affect marketing departments, but also product designers, who can now count on having their products placed on much more appropriate channels.Action Item: The rise of niche markets will be a phenomenon that advertisers, marketing people and product designers alike must pay attention to.

Strategic Planning Assumption: Throughout 2015, the 80 percent of low-volume niche products will experience at least 2 percent more compound annual growth than the 20 percent of blockbusters in most retail categories (0.7 probability).




Less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years Beyond 10 years Years to Maturity

Low Impact

Benefit

Transform-ational

High Impact

Moderate Impact

SOAXBRL

Business Process PlatformsModel-Driven ApproachesCollective IntelligenceTrusted Computing GroupWS-Enabled Business Models

Internal Web ServicesRSSVoIP

Carbon Nanotubes

DNA LogicQuantum

Computing

BPM SuitesCorporate Semantic WebElectronic InkGrid ComputingLocation Aware AppsOLEDsSensor Networks

Augmented RealityInkjet ManufacturingInternet MicropaymentsMicro Fuel CellsRFID (passive)Text Mining

Business Rules EngineCorporate BloggingDesktop SearchSpeech Recognition for

TelephonyText-to-Speech

P2P VoIPSoftware as a ServiceTablet PCVideoconferencingWiMAX

4G Biometric Identity Documents

Biometric User Identification

Prediction Markets

Handwriting RecognitionLinux on DesktopPodcastingWikis

Type A Investment Profile

Type B Investment Profile

Type C Investment Profile

From Hype to Benefit: Prioritization

Key:4G fourth-generation wirelessOLED organic light-emitting deviceP2P peer-to-peerRSS really simple syndicationSOA service-oriented architectureVoIP voice over Internet ProtocolWS Web service

In this radar screen we have taken the technologies from the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2005 and reorganized them in a way that provides a defensible justification for technology investments. The vertical hype axis has been replaced with a focus on the potential benefit of the technology, and the horizontal axis groups the technologies according to their rate of maturation. Shown is a cross-industry assessment of key emerging technologies and the likely impact of each on business processes.Priority investments are in the top left of the radar screen, in which the technologies potentially will have a high impact and have reached a reasonable level of maturity. Companies that are conservative in their technology adoption (Type C organizations) may limit their focus to this area (for example, VoIP). Companies that are more-aggressive technology adopters (Type A and Type B organizations) are likely already using technologies that will mature in less than two years. Therefore, they will probably want to evaluate candidates further to the right or lower on the radar screen; for example, incorporating technologies, such as Web-services-enabled business models or text mining, that will not be in widespread use for at least five years but may provide a competitive edge in the interim.

Strategic Imperative: Use radar screens to provide an objective justification of technology investment priorities.




Strategic Technologies For 2006 and 2016

2006 Top 10 Technologies

Virtualization

Grid Computing

Service-Oriented Architecture

Enterprise Information Management

Open Source

Information Access

AJAX

Mashup Composite Model

Pervasive Computing

Collective IntelligenceMost worthwhile trends operate in a 10-year time frame from inception to mainstream.Ensure you have a technology planning and monitoring process.

2016 Top Trends

Help Yourself

Tagging The World

Community as Core Competency

Pre-canned Logic to Dynamic Assemblies

Real-World Web

Experience is the Computer

Unbundling Processes

Long-Tail Businesses

The 10 technologies discussed in this presentation are potentially strategic and valuable to many corporations. They are all partially immature today, but will mature enough for widespread use in the next 18 to 36 months. In many cases, maturity will occur only for a subset of the technology or for well-defined applications, with full maturity for more-general use lagging beyond the three-year window. This selection provides a pointer to 10 very interesting technologies, but does not represent a complete list of technologies to be evaluated and potentially used. For a longer-range and more-comprehensive view, we recommend the complementary set of presentations at Symposium: Emerging Trends and Technologies. These 10 opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-mature technologies, as well as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies. For example, real-time enterprises (RTEs) providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list of 10 might offer.

Date post:	19-May-2015
Category:	Business
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