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Next Generation Technology - A History of the Future
While I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in [w:computer science|computer science] I took a class that was called “The History of The future”. The professor who taught the class believed you can’t predict the future without looking at the past. I've always thought that was a pretty cool idea conceptually (and the class for that matter) and so it was that I incorporated that logic into setting about strategy and analysis work assignments. In laymen’s terms I often look back at what has been done, how well, how successfully while attempting to drive forward with new and innovative strategies that either were in support of a mission and vision or oft times defined them.
Fast forward from my college years and germane to the title of this post at hand – “[w:Next Generation Technology|Next Generation Technology] – A History Of The Future” is something I coined while between flights and reading the latest 2008 technology predictions from several analyst reports, published web articles around IT innovation as well as some daily [w:RSS|RSS] feeds I get to stay up on the market. Before I reveal what areas fall into the latest 2008 predictions lets evaluate the history for a moment to see how well that concept plays into tomorrow’s work.
Several years ago while I was working in a next generation technology development role supporting then an accomplished CIO as well as his lead and very capable strategist I was asked in late December 2005 to identify a set of next generation technologies that would be strategic enough to push them beyond the typical market offers and for which would be pushing the envelope of leading edge technology. Although at the time I had a pretty good feel for the types of service characteristics that would define next generation services capabilities no one really knew then or now what the “killer applications” were going to be or actually are in today’s time and market so ultimately I was fishing – for lack of a better word – and casting a pretty large and wide net so that something would stick!
To support my research to identify some key and strategic next generation technology in 2005 I relied heavily on several research reports, R&D analysis as well as pined the honeycombs of vendors (software and hardware alike) looking to solidify what my research was showing. In the illustration below a number of capabilities that were either just being introduced (in development) or that did exist gave me good insight as to what and why could be incorporated into [w:Next Generation Services| Next Generation Services] to enable a wide array of potential services that were not only innovative but that were differentiable in the market place:
Of course the illustration from above is dated several years but the point is that it helped form the basis for what I viewed in December 2005 as the “Next Generation Services” list that would at some point or another potentially saturate the innovation landscape. To that end, my perspective from 2005 on the top 20 or so Next Generation Services was composed of the following technology and service areas:
-Web Services
-Next Generation Unified Communications & Conferencing leveraging Presence Aware Communications
-Service Oriented Architectures
-Dynamic Meta Data Brokering
-Mobile E-bonding Services
-Device and Location Agnostic VoD Services / VoD
-Mobile SIP Communications
-Wireless MESH Networking
-Public WIFI Services
-Smart Multi Radio Internetworking
-Storage Services
-Mobile Applications
-Hosted Applications
-Fixed Mobile Convergence
-Virtualized data connectivity services
-Seamless Media Eco-Systems
As noted some industry analysts have recently released their views on the top next generation technology areas that will be most innovative in 2008. Those are as follows (in no particular order):
-Metadata services
-Virtualization
-Unified communications
-Automation
-Web based service platforms
-“Cloud” or “Fabric” computing (One could argue that fabric computing is the basis for cloud computing because architecturally the concepts are similar although physically they could be very different)
-Enhanced service management
-Dynamic content markup and creation services
-Social computing – I still don’t understand how some social web sites are valued where they are!
-Green IT – no not flex fuels, but cost savings …. Oddly this is one area that pundits are abound b/c conceptually it may be a great idea but in execution it takes energy and lots of it during transition to save energy.
I am the first to admit that I cast a wide net originally hoping and wondering if some of the technology innovations being discussed at the time would still be around today …. And I can honestly say that I am surprised as to how many actually appear to not only be on the new list from the industry analysts but that are actually somewhat pervasive in market adoption and consumption. If you review the original list from 2005 compared to the 2008 projections of next generation technology one begins to see that the history often times can predict the future! I am not convinced all will take and saturation/consumption models may not expand exponentially but its possible a few key one's will become mature enough to reach a tipping point in market adoption and thus truly become leading technologies for 2008. It should also be noted that when one analyzes the potential success of new market technology adoption its akin to a [w:poisson distribution|poisson distribution] where not all discrete events occur in time to ensure the probability of success. With that said there are clearly a few noted above that will become more pervasive as the year proceeds and will very likely mature successfuly.
In the end you can’t know for certain what innovative idea is going to strike it big … but what you can know for certain is that you may miss your opportunity to create a successful strategy and mission if you choose not to look back on history to see how the future might perform. That is why I always develop my strategy by looking at the history to define the future goals.
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hobika – Tue, 2008 – 01 – 15 09:23