Tags Change, Innovation, Entrepreneur

Future tech

Twenty years ago, few would have guessed how the internet would change the way we do business. Keith Ryan wonders where the Next Big Thing will come from.

What’s the next killer app that’s going to change business forever? Tough call – there were those that claimed Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) software was going to run the telecoms into the ground and change the whole business comms landscape forever. After all, if business had access to free telephone calls, what would stop them dumping their network contracts and signing up for something like Skype? But it didn’t happen – or at least, it hasn’t taken over yet.

So how can we be sure what the Next Big IT Thing’s going to be? Maybe it’s the wrong question. Maybe the real question these days is: what are the business issues driving the search?

“People have more technology – and access to more information than ever – to help them make their lifestyle choices,” says Brij Arjuna, consulting director, Portal Partnership (www.portalpartnership.com). “Increasingly, information sources – like websites, portals, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, blogs and wikis – are enabling them to create and use information-rich and personalised environments.

“The creation of a website or application, using content from multiple sources to create a new service, is known as a ‘mashup’. These now offer many services to the public, eg integrating mapping systems with weather, travel, news and images to provide tourist information for any point on a map of Europe.”

How will this change things? As Arjuna points out, like the internet, mashups will be brought into business by tech-savvy users quite quickly – and not as part of some top-down plan from management, but in an organic and immediate way – and though the business benefits may not be obvious from the start, they will become apparent soon enough: “It’s a move to an internet-centric model of applications and services,” Arjuna explains. “It will integrate with internal systems and processes, supporting the knowledge workers in the analysis and decision making that drives business processes. The underlying technology will ensure that IT departments become more responsive to the needs of the business, delivering applications faster than traditional applications coding.”

It’s not just collaboration and tech cross-overs that are likely to impress business in the future. Sometimes, the killer app (or service or system or even line of code) has more humble – though essential – foundations, as Cherry Rance, marketing manager at Achiever Business Solutions (www.achieverplus.com) explains: “It may not sound very futuristic, but governance and risk compliance (GRC) software platforms that support multiple legislative and regulatory compliance requirements are going to be a big part of business in the future.”

Given the current levels of legislation hitting businesses worldwide and the litigious environment in which so many work, businesses are trying to become “future safe” in more ways than one. Anticipating changes in regulations and having systems that are able to handle the change will be vital for future tech in business.

According to Rance, recent research confirms that businesses and analysts believe the burden of compliance in general will grow. A comprehensive independent survey conducted among Achiever Business Solutions’ customers backs this up: from 100 completed surveys, 80 per cent expected the burden of GRC to increase. Of these, over 94 per cent stated that they expected software solutions to help ease this burden and over 50 per cent were planning to increase compliance budgets.

That’s all well and good, but what about the theoretical Big Thing, the one that is only just at the start of what could be a very big wave?

For Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan out of the University of Toronto, the way we organise our workspace could be the starting point for a massive change in business. While internet services such as YouTube, MySpace and Flickr allow individuals to create their own personalised spaces online, the “BumpTop” (www.bumptop.ca – see their original presentation below) approach of Agarawala and Balakrishnan – “physically-based casual interfaces and pen-centric interactions” – will produce computer screens that look more like our actual desks instead of the typical flat screen displays of today.

As Agarawala explains in his MSc thesis, the BumpTop aproach makes “virtual desktops behave in a more physically realistic manner by adding physics simulation and using piling instead of filing as the fundamental organisational structure. Objects can be casually dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate objects in the real world.”

So what’s the tech topic that’s going to make a massive change in business? It’s anyone’s guess, really, but it’s obvious that it’s going touch all levels of corporate thinking, from the way we organise our virtual lives to the new creative approaches of a collaborative environment and keeping up with a changing world. And it’s imposible to say whether it’s going to be a new product, strategy, philosophy or software. Wherever it pops up, the one certainty is that if it works, it will spread like wildfire.

Printer Friendly Email This Article

Bump Top

BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.

Portal Partnership

With over 40 certified consultants within the IBM skills matrix providing consistent quality deliverables and 5 years and 40 customer implementations of Dynamic Content using WebSphere, Portal and Lotus Technology in most industry sectors, The Portal Partnership can deliver against all your expectations and needs with a thorough understanding of the management and technical issues.

Achiever Plus

Achiever Business Solutions is focused exclusively on the development and implementation of world class compliance software solutions.