The Mayan Chronicles: Future Trends in IT
The Mayans posited that cataclysmic or transformative events will occur in 2012, the end-date of a 5125-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar. Whether the Mayans predictions come true remains to be seen, but we do see transformative events on the technology horizon that companies need to be aware of, or ignore at their peril.
What the IT World Will Look Like on the Way to 2012
Fundamental Themes:
A. The successful enterprise will capitalize on the work of other organizations to a significantly greater extent than is done today. Such an enterprise will:
- Develop very few of its own applications. The most valuable person may not be a great developer but rather a greater finder of near-ready applications
- Integrate and assemble applications and data already built
- Utilize social networks and other free applications for internal as well as external communications
- Buy mobile applications from an app store and customize them rather than build them from scratch or hire a mobile application firm to build applications. The primary value of a mobile application company will be deployment assistance to help manage the numerous interfaces of devices used by employees, clients, vendors
- Run as many applications as possible that are hosted and maintained by someone else, even if the functionality is less than desired. Functionality can be upgraded with an add-on or applet
- Outsource recruiting to the hiring manager who will use Linked-in and Facebook. HR will become more of a compliance and benefits administration function
- Seek ways to move and update applications and data from any device to any other device
- Focus more on managing image libraries than on creating images and be much more concerned about the legal implications of image management
- “Rogue” applications will be a lot better tolerated
B. Offshore and other non-domestic development will realign as new countries enter the offshore provider market. Offshore work will be viewed as the blue collar rung of the development hierarchy. Embedded apps for the increasingly larger mobile computing market will be strongly driven by Americans; just as early PC apps were an American phenomenon.
- For the US and Canada, the new offshore region will be Brazil and other countries in Central and South America for reasons of minimizing time zone differences.
- For Western Europe, the Eastern bloc countries will take a much larger role in “offshore” development
- India will remain an offshore powerhouse but much of what is developed for Western corporations will be developed by teams led by Westerners located in India
- India itself will locate more of their development shops in Western countries for marketing reasons as well as a growing lack of resource in their own country
C. Significant organizational and functional changes will occur throughout the company:
- The CIO will be more involved in:
- Regulatory and legal activities
- Direct consumer and vendor interface applications
- Offshore coordination
- Joint corporate ventures within industry and/or business function
- The fate of existing long-term projects will be evaluated very closely and probably by outside experts working with the CFO and CIO.
- The IT skill set of the “non-IT” departments will increase as higher level function becomes more powerful and less “dangerous” to corporate databases and other departments
- The frequency and source of education and educational “swat teams” to roll out function quickly and to train user departments
- The expansion and maintenance of ERP systems will become a utility which will likely be outsourced significantly
- The hardware budget become even more distributed due to:
- Cloud computing
- The power of client computers
- The mobility of client devices
- The IT communications budget will go down for connectivity and content. It will be found in user departments for handheld devices – primarily cellular phones. Carrier revenues will drop due to increasing quality of Skype and other free or low cost carriers.
- The need for cross-unit and inter-company collaboration in building anything will be greater because it can be greater. Inter-department collaboration will focus more on what and less on how
D. Outside consulting firms will facilitate migration as often as they will build major applications. New “super-adaptor” consulting firms will transform consulting into a collaborative art.
- Business Process Re-engineering will take place in weeks, not months and will be designed around existing technologies and applications.
- Rapid organizational re-alignment will be spearheaded by outside firms.
- IT Asset Management (ITAM) will be required for compliance and cost reasons
- Regulatory compliance will be outsourced almost entirely
- Super-adaptor firms will be able to take over existing projects and complete them in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost now allocated to these projects
- Super-adaptor firms will be able to shut down non-essential development – especially those related to ERP
- Business Intelligence applications will drive specialized consulting services to establish procedures for documentation of development artifacts to allow future BI applications to be built almost entirely by integration
- Testing will occur mostly in real time by actual users. Outside testers will be facilitators. Their role will be to expedite getting the application in front of the use and then come up with ways to verify functionality and user satisfaction on the fly.
- Development will occur via successive approximations. Outside firms will work with the IT department to determine the general stages vs. hard and fast milestones.
- Super-adaptor firms will “mine” the infrastructure for massive savings in legacy systems, communications costs, and contractor fees.
- Super-adaptor firms will transfer much of the burden of vendor management to the vendor
[...] Original post by Charles Herrick [...]
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Mobile computing is on the rise these days. Maybe we will get a dual core powered cellphones in the future.’,`