Green IT: The issue of energy efficiency and improved energy utilization will become a driving strategic issue for IT. As Thibodeau notes, if IT does not address it, governmental regulators will. Aside from these threats, increasing energy costs and access to adequate energy sources will increasingly become an organizational issue, not just impacting IT. Those organizations that address this issue early obtain a significant competitive advantage because while energy costs are currently variable, the trend is that those costs will continue to increase at an ever increasing rate.
Unified Communications: Simply put, running everything down the same pipe. Once information is converted to digital, a bit does not know whether it is a voice bit, video bit, image bit, or data bit. As a result, communication convergence enables capabilities such as email read through an audio device, phone messages to be available through an email system, and similar simplification of communication interchanges. The result is better communication, improved information transfer, and improved interaction among organizational entities and customers.
Business Process Management (BPM): While Thibodeau describes this as not being technology, I would disagree. BPM is a technology issue. It represents the development of common communication standards, common technology interfaces, and common transaction types that enable multiple departments within an organization and multiple organizations to efficiently and effectively trade information. In turn, this ability will reduce cycle time between transaction initiation and transaction fulfillment. The result will be increased responsiveness, improved accuracy, reduced rework, reduced cost, and increased competitiveness. It also offers the opportunity for an organization to more closely couple with their customers, thus effectively increasing customer loyalty.
Metadata Management: The vast majority of information an organization needs to effectively operate and position for the future exists today in the organization's various IT repositories. Unfortunately, the ability to find, retrieve, relate, join, consolidate, analyze, and use that various information is problematic at best. Increasingly, competitive advantage is being obtained by organizations that can effectively use this various data. It requires extensive understanding of what data are available, creating common definitions of data types and data usage, and providing integrated retrieval capabilities. The good news is that most companies are behind in this area. The bad news is that those to first achieve this ability will enjoy significant competitive advantage in terms of reduced response to market time, increased organizational flexibility, and the ability to effectively integrate customers directly into the infrastructure via Business Process Management technologies discussed earlier.
Virtualization: Utilization is the key here. Whenever you have a dedicated anything, if it is not being used at optimal capacity, there is waste. Anytime you have physical devices that operate at less than optimal capacity, you experience this problem. The solution is to work with "virtual" devices--servers, communication circuits, and display devices. By virtualizing the device, the ability to scale the device is increased so that utilization remains high. The result is that one large device can serve multiple uses and can adjust to meet peak demands from various users without the need to augment overall capacity. This provides cost savings (you use what you buy), responsiveness (you have what you need when you need it), and increased manageability (working with logical devices is simpler than working with physical devices). As an aside not addressed by Gartner, the ability to virtualize certain devices provides improved customer satisfaction. For example, the iPhone is a virtualized device (it is in fact a network connected computer) that provides phone access, Internet access, video access, and information access--morphing as the need arises.
Mashups: Mashups are the embodiment of what John Naisbett called "mass customization." Mashups provide the ability for the end-user to combine a variety of Internet information into new information views that meet a particular need. The objective is that the mashup is easy to accomplish and that various data sources provide the ability to be "mashed." In turn, the ease with which a particular organization provides their data in a format that can easily be used in a mashup determines how many customers will actually access and use that information. Once a customer has a mashup they like, they will be reluctant to change. The result is that if you are not first in, you may be excluded for a long time.
The Web Platform: Closely aligned with virtualization, this strategic development defines the move from local, dedicated applications to virtualized, Web-based applications that are effectively network-centric. As mentioned in the article, this strategy describes the shift from owned hardware and software devices to the Internet "cloud" computing, storage, and networking environment. Probably the most interesting thing about this development is that it is not new. It has been a trend that started in the late 1990s but has continued to gain momentum ever since. It will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Computing Fabric: Gartner treats this development as something new that is in the early stages of development. In actuality, it has been in development and has been rolling out for more two decades. Back in the mid-1980s, AT&T (the original one) developed a concept called the "Closely-coupled Computing Ensemble" (C3E). It basically consisted of a high-speed bus with various computing resources attached--compute, storage, math processors, graphics processors, and input/output devices. Sitting on top of this ensemble was an operating system supervisor that directed work to available resources. The result was maximum utilization, reduced bottlenecks, and improved throughput. But the computing fabric has been around for decades. Storage-area networks, network-attached storage, specialized servers (such as print servers), grid computing, on-demand computing, Web-based applications, and cloud computing are all examples of the deployment of a computing fabric. The point is that this is not a future development, but rather a rapidly accelerating trend.
Real-World Web: Similar to my thoughts on ”Computing Fabric,” the real-world Web is all about how the computing, access tools, and the network are increasingly being used. As with Mashups, end-users are increasingly finding increased value in Internet services, the overwhelming majority being provided through the Web. Retail sales have been long established, dating back to text-based services such as Prodigy in the 1980s. Today, that simple service has developed into the highly sophisticated retail/distribution/warehousing/fulfillment/logistics ecosystems such as Amazon.com. What I believe Gartner is getting at here is that these ecosystems will continue to multiply and though Mashups, continue to evolve into ever sophisticated combinations that will provide more, valued information and services to the end-user. As an example, I can now tie retail services such as Circuit City to Google Maps and Weather Channel forecasts to obtain a specific product, ensure that it is in-stock, gain the best price, find the closest location, obtain the best route (with fewest delays and construction), and determine the weather along that route—all from a consolidated Web page. The result is better service, reduced seek time, maximized value, increased customer satisfaction, and the establishment of a customer loyalty chain (if it worked this time, it will likely work the next, thus eliminating competition). The real-world Web is not about looking for things; it is all about finding things and solving real-world problems.
Social Software: Humans are by nature social animals. That’s why we form groups, societies, cultures, organizations, and nations. Throughout the development of the computing/information age, there has been this concern that we humans are becoming increasingly isolated and non-social. Lost in these beliefs is the fact that people write emails much more often than they ever wrote letters; or the fact that almost everyone I see is talking on a cell phone, something not possible with a landline phone. Add to that the typical cell phone has a single rate regardless of location within a country (and increasingly often international access), and there is a strong argument that technology has made us more socially connected. What differentiates this technology-based social connection from social software is the difference between point-to-point communication and multi-point and collaborative communication—it re-establishes the social network so that communication, exchange, ideation, interests, recreation, and work can be shared, group experiences. This strategic development probably started with telephone party lines and has morphed through chain email letters to today’s online shared environments such as Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets, MySpace, and Facebook (not to mention these blog spaces).
Regardless of your view on these strategies or trends, they are developments that will directly impact how organizations perform work, reach customers, interact, inform, and compete in the future. From that viewpoint, organizations must look at them, determine how and when they should engage, and determine whether value lies in development, acquisition, or partnering to take full advantage of these developments.
