ITWeb's Biz Beat Newsletter carried this article on my predictions for 2010 and beyond:
Today, a new instrumented, intelligent, and interconnected world, a smarter planet, is emerging that offers great promise for addressing some of the our most pressing problems. It also creates an entirely new set of business and technology issues that will need to be considered.
Organisations need to rethink their security strategies and implement fine-grained control of each resource they want to protect. In addition, organisations will have to implement a multi-tiered containment approach to prevent one breach from disrupting the entire organisation. Businesses need to implement far-field detection strategies and tools to prevent problems from happening before they occur.
Cloud computing will increasingly be part of an innovative computing approach that will create and meet the needs of a more dynamic infrastructure, allowing organisations to respond to the opportunities and challenges of a smarter planet.
The world's transition to a services economy has been in the making for the past three decades. A standardised IT factory or services factory is emerging to enable consistent high-quality delivery of services. These factories will enable an adaptable, intuitive interface to the service consumer, where a positive experience is engineered and delivered, along with the planning and anticipation that goes into excellent exception handling.
Backstage, consistent delivery is enabled through standardisation, automation, and learning systems for continuous improvement.
The next generation of data analytics is emerging, which will enable organisations to analyse information in near real-time. It is increasingly possible not only to help a decision-maker identify possible actions to choose from, but also to evaluate those options. After the decision is made and acted upon, its outcome must be monitored and the accuracy of the predictive models evaluated.
Applications that respond to the opportunities of this new world exhibit requirements that are much broader than those found in traditional applications. Hybrid systems architecture is emerging that combines general purpose functionality with specialisation, to drastically improve the system characteristics needed to support these new applications, at comparable cost.
