Predicting the Year Ahead

We asked our Cutter experts to give predictions on upcoming trends for 2010 and beyond. Here's what they had to say ...

 

• 2010 will see agile at scale take off in a visible way. There have been more and more successes over the past few years with organizations applying agile and lean strategies on large teams, on geographically distributed teams, in regulatory environments, in complex situations, and in some cases even at the enterprise level. The word is starting to get out, and the economic climate is motivating organizations to get a lot smarter about the way that they work, and that means they're becoming both leaner and more agile.

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• By 2015, operational technology requirements have merged with business requirements and vice versa. There's less distinction now between business and technology than there's ever been. We've gone from business technology alignment to business technology convergence in just a few short decades. Much of the heavy lifting that got us here was due to the efforts of hands-on, in-the-trenches CIOs who worked tirelessly -- often in their own self-interest, but tirelessly, nonetheless -- to raise the importance of technology at their companies. As it turns out, they may have been too successful: we now need their services -- at least the services that made them famous -- less now than we ever did. Conducting due diligence around the best infrastructure purchases isn't what it used to be. Spending months and months and months deciding which PCs to buy is no longer considered a good way to spend time. Most of the data center consolidation work has been completed. Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance formulae, we've largely solved the backup and recovery problem. Email? Word processing? Spreadsheets? These are all old problems, long since solved by dutiful CIOs and their minions.

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• XP 2.0. Agile engineering practices will gain traction as teams and organizations that have implemented Scrum work on increasing code quality. Practices like Test Driven Development, Automated Build and Test, and Continuous Integration will see wider acceptance. Several years after its initial surfacing, software craftsmanship (see http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/) will gain in momentum.

• Agile 2.0. Teams and organizations that have been practicing Scrum for 3 years or more will extend to hybrids like ScrumBan, Scrum/XP and even ScrumFall (if they lose executive sponsorship and are forced to backslide towards Waterfall). Kanban will continue to gain in momentum and mindshare.

• Business 2.0. More small to medium-sized companies will initiate enterprise-wide transformations, using Agile development principles in concert with Lean business process improvement in an attempt to transform their businesses in today’s harsh economic climate.

• Agile Failure 1.0. There will be more failures in agile adoption, as organizations attempt to drive the agile practices without fully understanding the agile principles; or simply jump onto the agile bandwagon and continue to practice waterfall (or whatever) while calling it agile.

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• 2010 will be the year in which mobile devices (iPhones, Android phones, etc.) become the client device of choice in many enterprises. Good bye laptops...

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• We are now at the real beginning of socially-mediated knowledge management. Everything is Social. We are social animals. We tried for a while to reduce everything to information and algorithms, but we haven't succeeded to do that with knowledge management. The abundance of information has transformed the challenge of finding knowledge from (in the words of British futurologist Peter Cochrane) "finding a needle in a haystack" to "finding a needle in a needlestack". We're coming to realize that "it's not what you know, it's who you know" need not be a bad thing: our network of colleagues, acquaintances and friends may get us the right information faster than even Google does. In addition to the increasing use of social networks in a professional context, 2009 saw the birth of interesting "social search" experiments like Hunch and Aardvark. Wikipedia's fundraising issues are just a phase; we're now at the real beginning of socially-mediated knowledge management.

• Collaboration in the Cloud will make it possible for employees to share documents, host their e-mail, conduct their teleconferences, manage their customer communications, etc., without installing Outlook, SharePoint or Lotus, giving companies leverage against the software giants. There are still large suites of software from Microsoft, IBM and a few others, deployed to millions of employees in Fortune 1000 companies and governments. We saw the first rebellions in the late 2000s, when some foreign governments used the threat of "going open source" to gain leverage against software giants. But thanks to the efforts of Google in particular, as well as Salesforce.com, plus smaller outfits like SlideShare or Freeconference.com, it now looks distinctly possible for employees to share documents, host their e-mail, conduct their teleconferences, manage their customer communications, etc., without installing Outlook, SharePoint or Lotus.

• Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer's loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee. 2008 and 2009 saw a bloodbath in IT ranks. Never well-protected from corporate misunderstanding and even mistrust, IT was forced to cut everything that the CEO and the CFO did not understand - which is a lot. As activity picks up in 2010, there is no spare capacity to start new projects, and rehiring takes some time. Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer's loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee (with fewer benefits than before they were released). There was already an erosion of the traditional employment model in favor of a contingent workforce. Expect that curve to go through a step function as a result of the crisis.

• Expect more sophisticated authorization and access control systems to be vital in the 2010s. Security is atomic. It used to be that the security architecture of an organization could be summarized by "us vs. them." Or, a little more subtly, "keep the bad guys out, and let the good guys in." The problem is, with collaboration moving to the cloud, and an increasing part of the work done by people on temporary contracts, who are the good guys and the bad ones? If you employ me as a consultant, you shouldn't give me access to your whole network, but only to those things I need to know, for a specific duration, on a particular topic, and with specific rights to do some things but not others. A company used to be like an egg: hard on the outside, soft on the inside. The eggshell is now definitively broken. Expect more sophisticated authorization and access control systems to be vital in the 2010s.

• By 2012, expect that compelling user features, the kinds of things that make people camp out overnight in the rain in front of an Apple Store, will come from those companies that understood how to maintain, then quickly ramp up, an investment in IT innovation and in the people capable of it. Innovation vs. Commoditization: A consequence of the recent crisis is that management has been looking to outsource everything in IT - often not even keeping enough people to problem-manage the contracts with outsourcers, provide sound governance, keep ownership of master data, etc. Innovation didn't seem so important in 2008-2009, and didn't Nicholas Carr say that IT didn't matter anyway? Companies that followed this to an extreme will no longer have the internal talent to re-innovate when they need to, nor can they rely on companies halfway around the globe whose contract is purely about reducing the cost per transaction while maintaining a service level barely above acceptable. By 2012, expect that compelling user features, the kinds of things that make people camp out overnight in the rain in front of an Apple Store, will come from those companies that understood how to maintain, then quickly ramp up, an investment in IT innovation and in the people capable of it.

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• Preparing for the Second Decade of the Third Millennium. We are nowhere near the end of this extraordinary surge in technological advancement. In fact, difficult though it may be to imagine, we are just at the beginning, and the pace will only increase.

  In 1899, the commissioner of the U.S. patent office, Charles H. Duell, purportedly declared: "Everything that can be invented has been invented." And as the current decade of intense technological progress draws to a close, we may be inclined to make the same statement ourselves.

  The past ten years have seen computers become cheaper, smaller, faster, and better. The unprecedented availability and exchange of information using global networks, wireless communications, cellphones, and miniature vast data storage devices, has characterized the first decade of the second millennium. And we are nowhere near the end of this extraordinary surge in technological advancement. In fact, difficult though it may be to imagine, we are just at the beginning, and the pace will only increase.

  Because the transition to the second decade will be seamless, the trends towards cheaper, smaller, faster, and better will continue. For many businesses this will require an unremitting drive to keep up, because falling behind may be fatal. In the fast lane of technology evolution the only thing that will remain constant is change, and businesses will need to learn to adapt.

  Consumer demand for computers and computer-based technology, and especially for software, will continue to grow, leading to increased market competition. This will require new lean and agile development methodologies, highly trained developers, and new development tools, in order to respond to the rapidly increasing market demands.

  In parallel, the demand for greater software reliability, quality, and ease-of-use will increase, as all sections of the population become ever-more dependent on computer-based products and services. Here too, training will become a key factor for technology-based businesses to maintain a competitive edge.

  Globalization will continue in business and technology, and new Asian powerhouses will emerge in China and India, with a growing influence on businesses in European and North American markets. Not only will Asia provide much of the world's technology manufacturing, it will also provide an increasing share of the world's technological innovations (just as hitherto did Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel). Thus, close relationships between technology businesses in North America and Europe and new innovative Asian technology businesses will intensify.

  In summary, the second decade of the second millennium will be just like the first, only more so.

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• In 2010-2011, Agile adoption will increase considerably, while the certification of newcomers will drop sharply in price and scale. As companies regroup post-recession, they will firm up co-located, on-shore development; any growth in off-shore efforts will be in the form of increased business representation.

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• Prediction 1: Radical change in Profession. In the next five years I expect a radical change in both the attitude and the reputation of programmers. We will see a rise of software craftsmanship, a community of people who take their pride and devote their professional lives to delivering excellent code at utmost productivity. They will be able to charge their fair share of the value generated.

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• Intelligent Aggregation is the best way to be successful in the current Web 2.0 environment. I expect to see this principle carried forward in 2010 in offerings from more software vendors. Ways to integrate your e-mail with messages from all of your social networks, IM, SMS, etc.; ways to make collections of documents more valuable by attaching people to them, i.e. when hovering over a document, you can see all of the authors' profiles, and through them you can link to other topic experts.

• We are going through a big shift, a paradigm shift right now. New ways of communicating spawn new behaviors, yet every enterprise strives to create value. This collaboration shift, coupled with new views on past and current economics, will start to play a bigger factor in years to come as we try to dig our way out of this recession. Companies that keep providing less and less value will find themselves quickly replaced by more agile Web 2.0 companies that are focused on creating value for the customer.

• Now there's about 2,000 commercial collaboration tools in the market (Collaborative Strategies tracks 1200). There has been an explosion in these offerings because of the SaaS distribution model and the focus on connecting people in the Web 2.0 context. I believe in the next few years we will see a steep retrenchment in this environment with a few large vendors such as Microsoft and IBM/Lotus as the dominant enterprise players, but with the focus shifting away from these heavyweight and costly applications, to smaller, lighter, less expensive applications that will require much less IT involvement, and will start to allow business users to both configure and create the applications they need on a JIT (just in time) basis.

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• Although Agile adoptions will proliferate, we will see an increase Agile project failures due to misunderstanding, misapplication, and misguided attempts to follow an "agile recipe."

  1. Although Agile adoptions will proliferate, we will see an increase Agile project failures due to misunderstanding, misapplication, and misguided attempts to follow an "agile recipe".

  2. Rifts will form in the Agile community as more Agile zealots emerge to insist that there is only one right way (their way) to properly do Agile development. (Sorry for the negative tone!)

  3. Oracle will acquire Sun, and MySQL will become less of an open source alternative and more productized with higher license, support, and maintenance fees.

  4. Cloud computing and SaaS will become widespread IT choices for database and business intelligence alternatives. CIOs will be concerned with finding the right balance between cost of in-house ownership of IT infrastructure versus the risk of trusting that cloud and SaaS partners remain healthy and viable.

  5. Kanban will emerge as a powerful Agile technique for managing support and maintenance activities by software product companies.

  6. People like me will come to learn that we aren't very good at predicting the future.

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• Actionable EA. The concept of a central, model-based repository will emerge. These repositories will be XMI based, support integration capability with external production systems in order to implement a "live" EA where a change in a model can affect the business.

  Enterprise Architectures rely on an integrated vision of other architectures, information, business, IT, data describing processes, services, resources, motivations, data descriptions, KPI, rules, policies of government and more. In EA organizations, data becomes more valuable by investigating how they co-relate with other organization dimensions and how the different architectures fit together.

  Business, IT, data and service architectures are often modeled and captured with different tools, and most of the time the models reside in different databases, using proprietary encoding. They are not web accessible; they are trapped in tools, files and often represented as dumb pictures. These models need to be harmonized and aggregated in conformance with an EA framework. But there is the risk of duplicating this information in "yet another repository" that has the possibility of soon becoming obsolete.

  There is a need to design and develop various tools, approaches and techniques for querying, viewing, federating and analyzing the architectures of the organization as a whole. This can enable consistent visibility and collaboration and provide for external comments and input from stakeholders. Organizations can not afford to implement EA projects by copying or rewriting EA models. The concept of a central, model-based repository will emerge. These repositories will be XMI based, allow versioning, dependency, AS-IF analysis scenarios, support integration capability with external production systems in order to implement a "live" EA where a change in a model affects the business. Having "IT aligned with the business" is already an obsolete goal — IT and business are symbiotic. Models will soon be actionable in order to affect the production systems and the business itself; models will serve as a nervous system, giving the organization the capability to not only receive signals from the probes, but to also send commands, as happens in the control room of a nuclear plant. Organizations can not afford the actual lag/latency in steering its behavior. The availability of a "control room" on top of an enterprise model-based repository will be soon a competitive advantage for organizations.

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• I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. Serious as the various problems we all are wrestling with after the 2008-2009 macro-economic crisis are, they should be viewed as systemic to the way a new generation of revolutionary infrastructure gets assimilated in economy and society.

  As observed by Perez, comparing the 2008-2009 crisis to the 1929 crash is no sensational journalism. The 1929 crisis was like our own generation being simultaneously hit by the burst of the "dot-com bubble" in 2000 and the financial collapse in 2008. While it certainly did not feel so at the time, we were fortunate to go through a double bubble over a decade instead of facing a culmination of the two bubbles as a single devastating event.

  The rise of the Internet in the 1990s as a global digital infrastructure has been as disruptive as water canals, railways and highways had been in the past. In each case, the revolution in the communication and transportation infrastructure was inevitably accompanied by insane speculation followed by a crash of biblical proportions. The sustainable benefits were, and will be derived in the future in the periods of stability that follow such crashes. Scary that 2009 was, it has actually served as the transition year from crisis to stability.

  The power of the Internet as the great predecessor of water canals, railways and highways is amplified by that of ubiquitous microprocessors and pervasive software. The three in combination beget a revolution in techno-economic affairs, enabling each of us to punch above our weight class (to use the metaphor coined by Hagel, et al). When harnessed through a combination of maturing Open Source and Agile techniques, the accumulative effect of very many of us "punching" hard defies imagination. In good time, we will all look back at 2010 as the year in which a new sun has arisen.

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• On-Demand/Cloud-Based BI and Data Warehousing. I expect adoption of on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing to experience steady growth in 2010. Several trends will be responsible for this. First, the state of the economy is having a strong effect on corporate BI and data warehouse funding, and many IT organizations are considerably underresourced while at the same time under a lot of pressure to cut costs. Consequently, looking to do more with less, they realize that BI is a very important but costly necessity, so they are turning to on-demand/cloud offerings and services. Second, providers are continually introducing more comprehensive on-demand/cloud-based offerings. And third, the concept is not so new any more. Consequently, it appears that end-user organizations are becoming more open to utilizing outside applications and services to meet at least some of their BI and data management needs.

• Open Source BI and Data Warehousing. I see the use of open source BI and data warehousing tools continuing to gain increasing acceptance by end-user organizations, with usage accelerating in 2010. Although you can attribute some growing interest in open source BI to the economy, increased use can also be attributed to the fact that the open source BI and data warehousing offerings have matured, with some -- like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Infobright, and Actuate (BIRT), to name a few -- now in their third (or higher) releases. This, combined with the fact that the open source BI vendors are constantly teaming up to offer joint solution packages, means that these solutions are now much more comprehensive. Moreover, because the vendors have been around awhile, they can point to more customers using their tools. Simply put, open source BI and data warehousing tools have gained a substantial degree of respect and acceptance among end-user organizations.

• Analytic Databases. In 2010, I see use of analytic databases increasing considerably. Driving this increase is that fact that organizations are struggling to deal with rapidly growing data volumes. Organizations also want to implement new types of BI applications requiring high analytic throughput.

  Use of analytic databases has been somewhat limited in the past, primarily, I believe, due to the popularity of the leading vendors' standard relational databases, with which organizations are quite familiar. This, I believe, is changing and, in 2010, I see use of analytic databases increasing considerably. Driving this increase is that fact that organizations are struggling to deal with rapidly growing data volumes. Organizations also want to implement new types of BI applications requiring high analytic throughput. In addition, I see organizations increasingly turning to the technology as a way to significantly boost the performance of their existing data warehouses and analytic applications by offloading compute-intensive processing to exploration warehouses and marts designed for specific needs. Moreover, analytic databases are based on new designs employing new architectures, making them ideal for deploying in both public and private cloud environments.

• Collaborative/Social BI. In 2010, collaborative BI will begin to become more practical because the BI vendors will increase their efforts to add Web 2.0/social computing capabilities to their BI platforms. I expect organizations to readily embrace the idea of social/collaborative BI.

  In 2010, collaborative BI will begin to become more practical because the BI vendors will increase their efforts to add Web 2.0/social computing capabilities (e.g., blogs, wikis, social networks, BI search, and mashups) to their BI platforms. I expect organizations to readily embrace the idea of social/collaborative BI. For one, I think the concept makes sense and business leaders will see the value in collaborative BI because it offers a focused application for applying social computing/Web 2.0 concepts. (This is opposed to some vague call for adding social computing "throughout the enterprise," which I do believe in but with which I can see why many corporate leaders might have misgivings.) The need for enhanced collaboration among BI users as well as among BI consumers to better communicate with their respective peers and colleagues is a concept that's pretty easy to grasp. And this need to better collaborate covers the gamut of the BI process -- from creating analyses and interpreting and discussing the significance of the results, to attempting to determine the most effective ways to apply the findings. In fact, our research finds that about one-quarter of end-user organizations currently use Web 2.0 techniques to support their BI users. But the clear majority of the Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities that organizations are using are in the form of separate applications -- as opposed to being integrated within the BI platform or environment. Look for BI vendors in 2010 to blend these capabilities into their platforms.

• Social Media Analysis. Expect the use of social media analysis solutions -- especially those offered by on-demand vendors -- to increase in 2010.

  Tools and services for analyzing social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc., received some attention in 2009. But for most organizations, social media analysis represents a whole new type of BI -- but one that they are keenly interested in because they understand that such sites offer a wealth of information expressing consumer sentiment, preferences, and trends, which readily influence consumer behavior. Expect the use of social media analysis solutions -- especially those offered by on-demand vendors -- to increase in 2010.

• Private Analytic Clouds. Most of the talk about on-demand/cloud-based BI and analytics seems to center around commercial providers offering such services. But in 2009, we saw the advent of the concept of the private analytics cloud (i.e., located behind the end-user organization's firewall) posited by analytic database vendors Greenplum and Teradata. The private analytics cloud concept centers around the idea of bringing flexibility and agility into an organization's enterprise data warehousing/BI environment by creating a platform that will enable companies to "virtualize" their data and analytics infrastructure, thus making it possible to create and manage large numbers of data warehouses and data marts that can be deployed across a common pool of physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure.

  Basically, the goal of the private analytics cloud is to let companies create resource pools of data warehouses and data marts that can be self-provisioned by analysts and other users (without requiring a lot of IT assistance), so as to significantly reduce implementation and maintenance overhead and to allow end users to easily set up and conduct their own analyses. This self-service, in-database development also reduces or eliminates (depending on the analytic requirements) the need for IT to build separate, physical data marts.

  Cutter clients have contacted me saying that their organizations are keenly interested in private cloud environments, in particular for analytics, but that they are uncertain as to how to go about it. All sorts of questions persist as to what software (open source, commercial, custom), hardware, implementation models, and so on, to use. That vendors like Greenplum and Teradata have begun to build out their private analytics cloud capabilities should help further corporate interest in the concept. Consequently, I see organizations beginning to express increasing interest in private analytics clouds in 2010.

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• The HHS, in partnership with the FTC, will more aggressively pursue HIPAA and HITECH compliance than they have to-date. They will apply more sanctions for HIPAA in 2010 than they have in total to-date (just 2 so far).

• Businesses in all industries, but especially retail, high tech and SMBs, will increasingly depend upon social media to generate significant portions of their revenue stream. Bigger privacy breaches than any that have occurred so far on social media sites will occur as a result of no information security or privacy pre-planning at many to most of these organizations.

• More SMBs will turn to cloud computing to more securely do business processing. Many SMBs do not have the resources or personnel available to effectively implement an information security and privacy program that is in compliance with all their numerous requirements. As a result, large numbers will turn to cloud computing solutions that have the necessary security, and that also are in compliance with laws, regulations, and industry standards.

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• A small but significant number of organizations will "get it" when it comes to agility. They will begin to appoint Chief Agility Officers (CAO) who may initially report to the CIO, but over time will report to the CEO. These organizations understand that business responsiveness -- agility -- is key to their success and that creating a CXO-level officer to focus on responsiveness is as critical as creating CIO or CTO positions. The CAO's role will be to extend agility far beyond agile software development or agile project management to agile customer solution delivery that might involve marketing, sales, distribution, or services delivery.

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• The consumerization of IT by end-users and availability of a widening array of cloud-oriented services that can meet the needs of business units will drive CIOs and IT organizations to reassess their roles, responsibilities, skills and operating structures.

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• Trend: Lean ITIL. Lean enterprise architecture. "Look for ITIL and enterprise architecture programs to get pointed not at 'solving world hunger' but at finding significant cost reductions. Top IT shops will be more successful by casting these initiatives as productivity enhancers rather than grand unification theories," says Kellen.

• Trend: Social network analytics. "Gosh golly, the visuals depicting social networks are so cool! And they grab executive eyeballs. We all love novelty items and this one has some legs. Why? Understanding how networks of people consume or deliver value is both a powerful and a simple concept. The analytic models work well for understanding networks of customers, employees, suppliers, and partners. Social networking systems or simple survey designs can tease out levels of trust and information flow across the networks. New toys! New models! Game on!"

• Trend: Cloud bursting. Defined as data center systems that can redirect overflow computing processing to cloud service providers, cloud bursting is a natural starting point for cloud initiatives. Says Kellen, "I have never seen a conversation generate more CIO frowns than a discussion of the cloud. If CIOs are dour on the cloud, why am I positing this as a trend? Two reasons pop to mind. First, large software vendors are clearly pouring a lot (if not most) of their R&D efforts into leveraging cloud computing. That is always a good predictor of the future. Second, while many CIOs pooh-pooh the cloud, they do so because of the lack of time they have spent in understanding it more deeply. As knowledge of how cloud services actually work grows, look for initiatives in 2010 to take lower-risk items, such as testing and development and some overflow demand into the cloud. Do you see the pattern emerging? Smaller investment + less risk + greater payoff + growing vendor support = trend."

• Anti-trend: Big ERP CRM. "With the recent hype regarding social network analysis (SNA) and the extraordinary growth in social media in 2009, expect more and more firms to pause on any large-scale customer relationship management (CRM) investment," predicts Kellen. Why? According to Kellen, "Firms will want to figure out how these new tools may affect their customers and their markets. Big vendors would be wise to extend their conventional CRM tools into the social network world. Look for some vendors to drop the 'C' from the acronym. The social networking world doesn't know the differences among customers, employees, and suppliers. The software doesn't have to either and can be bought once and used many times for different things. Look for more niche social media CRM solutions in 2010."

• Anti-trend: Generic BI. "Generic BI suffers many of the same ills as big CRM. Gone are the days of dozens and dozens of vendors slicing up the market. Large software houses want to charge $1,000-$10,000 per seat to cover their equally large selling and overhead costs. They also want to sell lots and lots of seats. Unfortunately, like making wine, squeezing value out of data is a leveraged affair. It is better to have a few masters of the data do the harvesting, destemming, crushing, pressing, fermenting, and barreling of the data. The vast majority of workers in an enterprise don't want to have to think harder and longer, they want the computer to do more thinking for them. Generic large-scale BI for the masses should be a permanent anti-trend. I will refuse to discuss this any further!"

• Anti-trend: Microsoft. Says Kellen, "As much as I hate to pick on any one vendor, I can't help but think as I watch the competitive landscape evolve that I have seen this movie before. While many Microsoft enthusiasts are still among us, so many other players are now shaping the industry. I can't help but feel that Microsoft's time has come and we are witnessing the long tail of its decline. It may not end in a bang, like so many other technology flameouts, but with a whimper."

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• Agile Failure(s) - There will be some big public agile adoption failures this year. These will be companies that tried to agile in name without understanding the change in values and mindset.

• Fake Agile Certification(s) - Agile is a change of mindset and values. Already there are several charlatan certifications as people jump on the band wagon. No certification can measure whether a person has truly understood agile and adopted the mindset. Instead of worrying about certification when purchasing training, talk to the trainer and see if they understand agile and teaching. Don't worry about the certification.

• Agile Business - The leading organizations have mastered agile as a software development process to the point that they produce products faster than sales/marketing can handle. To get the greatest benefit these organizations will need to take an agile/lean approach to the whole business starting with sales/marketing and eventually encompassing legal, HR, etc.

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• Agile-lean will become the new mainstream approach to project management and software development. Latin America will become aware of this and will start investing heavily on its adoption towards the end of the year in an attempt to bridge the IT gap between developing and developed countries.

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• Auditing of security from multiple levels, human to electronic, will become a major new growth area, especially in cloud computing and trusted infrastructure protection. Auditing of security from multiple levels, human to electronic, will become a major new growth area, especially in cloud computing and trusted infrastructure protection. This includes activity monitoring beyond intrusion detection. It includes the concepts of "exfiltration" of data out of a company, as well as "infiltration" of workers into sensitive corporate electronic assets. Infiltration can be deliberate, which is rare, or it can be inadvertent but damaging access to sensitive data as a result of weak corporate security practices or workers who are not trained in security best practices in the corporate sphere. Current audit practices by vendors will also be renovated as the growth of hacking, spyware, and other software malware aids criminals in breaching security. Bona fide corporations with elite hackers will see more business from corporations that want the truth about the security resilience of their infrastructure beyond the warm and fuzzy vendor assurances.

• A new synthesis of social computing technologies and virtualization - socially virtualizing mobile productivity technology - will come to the fore. Socially virtualizing mobile productivity technology will come to the fore. This is a new synthesis of social computing technologies and virtualization, where collaborative and cooperative personalized group computing can occur, even when people are mobile via wireless media communications. Social media brings together communities of interest within corporations and between partner or allied corporations; virtualization allows a corporation to increase agility and cut costs while providing a seamless environment for workers, whether they're at the office, at home or in transit, and on any device regardless of operating system. These three technologies - mobile technology, social computing and virtualization - will enable a faster pace of corporate operations by reducing log-in churn (single sign-ons) and bottom lines (virtualized (thin) clients on cheaper hardware) and increasing productivity (less aimless searching for solutions by working through communities of interest). An early indicator of this trend is Facebook's effort into location-based services, a combination of social computing with mobility.

• Predictive business intelligence and analytics technology will be the next wave in tools for the high-level decision maker and will find its way into many BI products. Whether for comprehending customer behavior, understanding product lines in the marketplace or assessing risks, threats and opportunities, there is a growing need in the faster-paced, more agile economy for superior intelligence and analytics tools and services. ERP, CRM, market analysis, logistics and operational decision making are reliant on a rapidly generating and analyzing multiple scenarios and possible course of action. The key is to select the scenarios that likely future evolution accurately portray, and the likely future course of action to retain resilience in the face of changing conditions. This kind of forecasting in business intelligence and analytics technology will be the next wave in tools for the high level decision maker and will find its way into many BI products.

• The Cloud idea, which is connected to the idea of virtualization, will be combined with the Green idea to make "Green Clouds," which will help corporations migrate to Green-IT, reducing costs and gaining the benefits of green credits. Cloud concepts are rapidly developing, but the sales spin on Green Clouds has yet to become a major decision force; I predict it will.

• New hardware will emerge and shape next generation service-oriented hardware with service-oriented software. I predict that new hardware will emerge and shape next generation service-oriented hardware with service-oriented software. The concept of the hardware appliance, already popular in blade data centers and corporations, combined with service-oriented software (which is growing due to cloud computing) will merge, resulting in ultra-thin, ultra lightweight equivalents of mobile supercomputing. Multimedia, games and services technologies will begin to converge, pushed by consumer demand, and will focus on location, personalization and availability of computing services for specialized, appliance-like uses. New business niches for very cheap products that scale on the global level for these devices will emerge and business that cater to this niche, adopting and developing product lines using cloud concepts, may find healthy profit margins.

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• In 2010 and beyond, we will see growing interest and major developments in cloud computing, green IT, and mobile systems and applications. We'll be computing in the clouds using smart mobile devices, contributing towards a greener planet. Cloud computing, green IT, and mobile systems and applications, driven by economic and environmental imperatives and the promise of flexibility, convenience and additional features, are poised to transform the business and personal computing landscapes. They present a unique, powerful cocktail and promise to deliver us several new novel applications that were not feasible or couldn't be conceived earlier. Hence, in 2010 and beyond, we will see growing interest and major developments in these areas, and we'll be computing in the clouds using smart mobile devices, contributing towards a greener planet.

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• We are no longer in the era of mainframe computing, when both companies and applications were typically command-and-control oriented and organized in vertical silos. With the combination of the Internet, fiber optics, and PCs, the business and technology playing field has been flattened. The first effect on technology is that systems will no longer primarily be top down. Instead, as individuals, small groups, and organizations interact around the world, technology must support approaches that are more side by side.

  The second effect is that enterprises must consider that the systems they develop will be in touch with individuals who they'd never been in touch with before; they'll be challenged by groups that have never challenged them before; they'll compete with organizations with which they had never competed before; will collaborate with entities with whom they had never collaborated before. They will be doing things they had never dreamt of doing before.

  In short, business technology must encourage less command-and-control centralization and more horizontal connecting, collaborating, and competing. In order to accommodate this, businesses must adjust and make the transition from vertical to horizontal thinking. Vertical thinking typically involves asking who or what commands and controls the system; horizontal involves a more peer-to-peer way of thinking. This means global enterprises cannot have a single service registry for SOA, cannot adequately support complex event handling via a single "big brain" rules system, and program process flow must be agile to handle case-management style situations.

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• I predict that this year the netbook + 4G wireless network will create an explosive new marketplace. This is a particularly difficult time for us futurists, for about this time each year, without fail, we are barraged with pleas (challenges) to figure out what the next great (technology) thing that is coming out in the next year and years to come. Then someone publishes their wildest guesses and the feedback starts. Now, I have had a pretty good record with technology forecasts; sure I occasionally get the decade (even the century) wrong, but can I help it if the rest of the world doesn't catch on as quickly as I do?

  This year, my major forecast has had to do with the coupling of a number of technologies to create an explosive new marketplace. That forecast ... DRUM ROLL ... is NETBOOK + 4G WIRELESS NETWORK (Netbook+4G for short). On a hunch, I picked up an MSI netbook about 9 months ago, and I love it. It is light weight (about 2 lb), it starts up fast and shuts down faster, it runs Windows XP and all my favorite office programs, it has wireless built in ... and you can open it fully on the dropdown tray of a normal coach airline seat.

  Now all of the these advantages might just be a temporary technical hot flash, but the reason that the Netbook+4G combination is going to be such a big success is, I predict, that it fits a significant hole in one of the next big consumer markets. Currently, the laptop market is what Clayton Christensen calls an "overserved" marketplace, i.e., one where products capabilities (and prices) are far beyond what the median user needs or wants.

  Now the Netbook comes along at just the right time from a consumer and technological standpoint. Laptops have been coming downs in price, from $2,000 to $1,000 and now to around $600-700. This plunge in price has had computer and software makers struggling keep their gross margins. The way that they have done this is by adding additional functionality or "coolness" (make it in colors, make it lighter, add a touch screen, make the screen HD). But these are nice-to-haves, not need-to-haves.

  There are segments of the population do need something that is truly "always on" and "always there". (Notice the increasing numbers of people you see busy on their laptops at your local book store, coffee shop or library, constantly in search for "free wifi" and an electrical outlet.) This segment uses their laptops for a couple of things: (1) the Internet, (2) reading and answering their email, (3) working on "office documents" and, of course, (4) listening to music and watching YouTube. At this point in time, all of these things can be done on a netbook that costs around $200. These devices support 95% of all the things that most people need without breaking your back or your bank.

  Now, connect these machines with a reliable 4G wireless network, and you fill a hole in the marketplace -- the hole between the full-sized, 6 lb. laptop, and the iPhone. Sure, you can do amazing things with the iPhone, but you can't type a term paper or fill out a serious spreadsheet or watch a movie for all that long. Right now, people spend a lot of time looking for free wireless locations. The current 3G networks are just barely capable of handling iPhone applications, but 4G networks will mean that a whole range of other applications will be possible with the next generation of Netbooks. My guess is that, in time, the Netbook will absorb a fair amount of the e-reader marketplace (just add a better, rotating tablet style screen and you're there).

  There are currently 4 current technologies behind the Netbook+4G: (1) price, (2) size and weight (3) form factor, and a distant (4) the 4G network. Over the next few years, the price of Netbooks will continue to drop, perhaps to somewhere between $50 and $100. At these prices, the number of families with multiple computers, even multiple computers per person will skyrocket. Lots of professionals, like myself, will have multiple identical Netbooks, just in case something happens.

  Netbook screens will continue to improve to the point that they can compete directly with e-readers. E-books, e-magazines and all the rest will continue to expand and the Netbook+4G will replace textbooks rapidly. (Textbooks are already predicted to be the greatest growth area for e-books in the next few years.)

  Netbooks will be increasingly rugged! If the Netbook becomes as universal as I believe that it will be, manufacturers will have to make them nearly indestructible. Look for companies like Panasonic to offer a version as quickly as the market explodes. The replacement of disk drives with flash memory will eliminate the last moving parts while dramatically increasing the Netbook's battery life. Look for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) hardware and software ideas to be quickly incorporated into future Netbooks. Mesh networks will spring up in formal and informal meetings and collaboration software with evolve to take advantage of this new world.

  Netbook operating systems will be increasingly based in the cloud. Google has announced that it will make the Chrome operating system a full fledged, light weight alternative to Windows. If you combine the functionality of the announced Chrome with Android, you have some idea of what is coming in terms of operating systems for Netbooks.

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• The next few years are going to be difficult for IT. Budgets will be flat while demand for IT continues to grow. IT will feel immense pressure to improve internal efficiency in order to make more money available for new services.

  During 2010, IT organizations will place additional emphasis on activities that will save money including:

  • Virtualization. In addition to virtualizing additional servers, organizations will expand virtualized storage and the desktop as well.

  • Supplier management. Organizations will work with key suppliers to lower the supplier's bill. At a minimum, they will review licenses and remove unused seats, services, or maintenance. (Telecom audits in particular usually save money.) More sophisticated organizations will closely tie each supplier product to a component of the IT Architecture to identify (and remove) redundant products.

  • ITIL. More organizations will adopt ITILv3 to reduce costs through standardized services.

  • Open source. Open source will continue to gain market share. While few large organizations will migrate to Open Office, it will be popular with startups and smaller organizations.

  While internal efficiency projects are not glamorous, each one saves money.

  To the extent that IT has discretionary funds to invest in new capabilities, the majority of those investments will be in one of three areas:

  • The customer experience. Today's customers are fickle and require more care than they needed a few years ago. Foundation systems and services will focus on ease-of-use and personalization. Customers should be able to place orders, track shipments, review bills, etc. quickly and easily. These systems will allow customers to see information on PCs, netbooks, and phones while remembering customer look and feel preferences.

    More sophisticated systems will increase customer engagement, building on the experiences of ESPN, Disney, Honda, and others. For example, ESPN viewers text their votes for X Games winners. Disney is using text messaging to help theme park visitors know when to be at popular rides. Honda uses an online racing game to promote its cars. The movie Avatar has a game tie-in to build awareness, get viewers to the theater, and sell Avatar-related merchandise.

  • Collaboration tools. Collaboration tools will be widely adopted for both efficiency and effectiveness. Expanded use of conferencing tools will reduce travel costs. Document management tools will be combined with social networking to foster information creation, storage, retrieval, and sharing. Increasingly, games will be used to train staff. (The military has used war games for years including video games that help soldiers distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in urban situations.) In addition to offering industry-specific information, these games foster teamwork while engaging Gen X and Gen Y staffers.

  • Industry-specific support. A number of industries such as health care, public safety, and hospitality will invest in industry-specific initiatives, such as:

    Health care. With the current emphasis on health care, providers will invest heavily in integrated patient management and information systems. The industry will make extensive use of games for both health care providers and for patients. Video games for surgeons that promote eye-hand coordination will become more popular as other hospitals learn of Beth Israel's experience. Games for patients will promote physical and mental agility as well personal care. Finally, health care providers will invest in patient support systems. These systems remind individuals to take medicine and remotely monitor vital signs.

    Public Safety. Police, fire, 911, and other public safety organizations will standardize communications and data definitions. They will integrate communications protocols and standardize data collection process across different responders. The immediate benefits will be improved responsiveness at the local level. Of greater importance, however, will be the ability to identify and track non-obvious patterns; for example, sharing data will help the Center for Disease Control monitor flu and other diseases.

    Hospitality. The hospitality industry will use IT to improve the guest experience. Guest preferences will be recognized throughout the property starting with check-in, continuing to restaurants, spas, health clubs or other services the guest wishes to access. While some individuals visiting Las Vegas or other casinos may prefer to remain anonymous, most people will appreciate the recognition, personalization, and attention to their comfort.

    Advanced Business Intelligence builds on these three areas to combine internal and external data. Information from loyalty programs is only the foundation. BI will move beyond demographics and psychographics to embrace external data from Facebook (through Connect,) LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, etc. This will enable short duration (a few hours), location-based, highly personalized offers to be delivered to individual customers.

  Consumer electronics features will finally be integrated into business systems. Woven through the above investments is a need to integrate advances in consumer electronics into the business. Historically business-IT was more advanced than consumer technology. The iPhone changed that pattern, but was ignored by most organizations because it lacked critical business capabilities. Consumers and employees have grown used to mobile computing and other consumer electronics. They will force business to integrate these features into IT systems and services.

  The cloud for quick, inexpensive IT capability for smaller businesses, but over the next two years, large companies will not place important apps in the cloud. Over the next two years, the cloud will be most appealing to startups, smaller companies, and minor divisions of larger companies. Many will use it as a quick and inexpensive way to develop a scalable, reliable IT capability. By contrast, large companies have too great an investment in existing infrastructure to migrate to the cloud quickly. Executives will question the CIO about the organization's cloud strategy. Numerous cloud pilots will be launched and there will be many discussions on the merits of both the public and the private cloud. However, over the next two years, large companies will place virtually no important applications in the cloud.

  IT's stature as a business enabler will rise dramatically. The next two years will be difficult for IT but will result in two unplanned benefits. First, the focus on internal efficiency will result in a more flexible, robust, and scalable IT infrastructure. This will enable IT to provide additional capabilities more quickly and at lower cost. Second, since IT will only have the money to deliver a handful of new services these will be closely aligned with business priorities. This improved alignment will dramatically raise the stature of IT as a business enabler.

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• Windows 7 will encounter its first serious breaches in 2010, leading to the inevitable questions about its long-term viability. Petabyte storage will become an organizational norm. The certification-rich environment of IT will begin to suffer a backlash against the proliferation of certifications. And we'll all have flying cars.

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• My prediction is not a technological one, but one that I believe businesses will realize: If a piece of technology is to succeed, it has to be, above all, convenient. As consumers, we have become addicted to convenience, or perhaps we are just lazy and want the easiest option. The cell phone is successful, not because it is high quality, but because it is convenient. The Blackberry is convenient. iTunes is convenient. I believe we will see a lot more convenience in our technology in the near future.

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• The year 2010 is bound to be marked by unique developments and changes in the way in which organizations make use of technology to support their business processes. The year 2010 is bound to be marked by unique developments and changes in the way in which organizations make use of technology to support their business processes. The globalization of the world economy will continue to push further for technology-based business processes, capable of overcoming, more and more, the geographical distances and barriers. The concern with the environment will continue, reaching a new dimension leading to growing impacts on company's products and services. With the likely improvement of global social stability and the slowing down of the financial crisis, investment in innovation is likely to grow. Based on this scenario, technological developments oriented towards closer multi-cultural collaborative environments will challenge even more traditional organizational models and processes, creating new business opportunities. How exactly all these changes will instantiate into specific developments and business paradigms may be unknown to most of us; however, one thing is certain: the organizational skills, knowledge and project-based capabilities required to manage and implement change will play an even greater role in the ability of organizations to adapt and thereby will be key to their success.

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• This prediction isn't so much for 2010, but for the upcoming decade. I see Agile Software Development following the same pattern as two other game-changing trends -- Relational Database Management Systems and Object-Oriented Programming. After early initial work in both of these areas, it took about 20 years for them to reach the Late Majority and Laggards phases of Rogers' Technology Adoption Lifecycle. At the 10-year mark, both industries had significant breadth in terms of companies and their approaches and tools, and indeed there was fragmentation of exactly what RDBMS and OO even meant at that point.

  At the end of 2009, I see the same thing happening in the Agile Software Development world. We have a number of approaches in use -- Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Extreme Programming, Industrial XP, Feature Driven Development, RUP and DSDM -- and there is fragmentation in the market. There is significant competition among the approaches and the vendors that provide tools to support them.

  In 2010 and beyond, market leaders will emerge. There will be consolidation and even some standardization of approaches. By the end of 2019, I expect that there will only be two or three approaches to Agile Software Development. These may not look exactly like the approaches we see today, but their roots will be quite recognizable because they will follow the values and principles of 2001's Agile Manifesto. Agile as an approach will be firmly entrenched in the Late Majority, with even Laggards considering it.

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• Continued "Cyber Events" will temper the rush to the Cloud. There's no doubt that the Cloud will be a significant draw in 2010. Especially for smaller, less technology based and sophisticated companies. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reasonable applications where the Cloud could make sense, but, I still have serious reservations. I personally don't want any vendor that has my personal information putting it on the cloud. I don't want my bank to be using anything other than a private cloud. Just last week Citibank (the 3rd largest bank in the US and no technology neophyte) lost tens of millions of dollars to an apparently Russian-based organization of cyber thieves. Nor do I want anything mission-critical running there. Luckily, I'm not a CrackBerry addict, so the repeated disruption of e-mail and BBM last week, due to a software upgrade, didn't affect me, but millions of people were put out by it. Again, RIM is a sophisticated technology company, but even they apparently have lax operational procedures (Hint...RIM...look up ITIL). And I especially don't want anything really important like the electrical grid, nuclear power, local police or fire, or defense running on it....oops, last week it was reported that Iranian militias have been intercepting the video feeds of Drone aircrafts for at least 6 months. Worse, the Pentagon have known about the vulnerabilities ever since the weapons were deployed in Bosnia over 10 years ago, but it didn't think local insurgents would be clever enough to exploit them. Well, $29.95 for some off-the-shelf software from a Russian company was all it took. They're not so dumb after all! Last week, the self proclaimed Iranian 'CyberArmy' hacked DNS to divert users to their propaganda page instead of Twitter. Any company with important information, a risk management policy, and some smart lawyers will sit out the rush to the cloud for at least 2010.

• Smart Enterprise Architects will get out in front of Cloud adoption. In 2010, they will develop compelling, federated, flexible strategies that identify the critical aspects of the enterprise and embody them in clearly defined roles and responsibilities for IT and the business for all aspects of Cloud services.

  I read Steve Andriole's prediction and frankly, it scares the crap out of me. I do agree that enterprise architecture will play a critical role moving forward, and that the provisioning of basic technology will become more of a commodity. And, I agree that the role of a CIO, and of architecture, is no-longer about provisioning platforms, picking PCs, or putting up email. But, I don't agree that those things have been an important part of architecture or the CIO for a long time.

  EA has been successful in the past decade by reducing complexity and redundancy, and by solving cross-organizational problems, such a creating and providing stewardship for single-customer views. The future Steve predicts is back to the bad-old-days of every line of business doing whatever it wanted, optimizing its own P&L while sub-optimizing the enterprise, implementing redundant and inconsistent capabilities and data stores, and creating the infamous "enterprise application spaghetti" that businesses have spent, and continue to spend, billions cleaning up. Architects don't want to be janitors, cleaning up the next enterprise mess because the business rushed - short-sighted - into this decade's panacea. We want to prevent the mess from occurring so that the enterprise can focus its resources and efforts on creating value, both short and long term, not on creating another technical liability.

  Nor, by the way, do we want the business running their own IT shops (see my prediction on cyber events if you need to know more). But, of course, the lure of the cloud is compelling, so architects will need to have an equally compelling story, and a better approach that incorporates the benefits of the cloud intelligently. We can't be in the business of saying "No". Instead, we need to have a better solution to solving the business' problems. In 2010, smart enterprise architects will develop compelling, federated, flexible strategies that identify the critical aspects of the enterprise and embody them in clearly defined roles and responsibilities for IT and the business for all aspects of Cloud services.

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• Social networking usage will expand within companies. Social networking has come of age and matured significantly. The tools are abundant and simple to use, offer excellent capabilities, and foster solid communication vehicles for a company to utilize. In 2010, IT has the opportunity to lead the way in introducing (or, by now, promoting) social networking capabilities within a company; usage is limited only by imagination and creativity. Ideas include implementing the following:

  • A company newsletter

  • An HR employee information and resources site

  • A client information and resources site

  • A manager resources site

  • An IT user group forum

  • A business application forum and resources site

  • A project team communication vehicle

  These tools give companies additional ways to communicate with employees and clients, plus offer excellent means in providing value to both groups in a very cost-effective manner.

• IT will be called on more to help reduce costs and improve company productivity. In tough economic times, IT organizations must be more business-driven; thus, senior managers should begin looking for internal ways to reduce costs and improve productivity. IT has leverage here in that it is the only group within an organization that can help reduce costs and improve productivity within business units. As companies "retrench" (as many have in 2009), IT is in a unique position to help companies move forward by delivering projects that provide tangible business value. Such initiatives can deliver or support the following:

  • Cost reductions

  • Revenue increases

  • Productivity improvements

  • Company differentiation

  • Client-relationship improvements

• Companies will attack energy consumption. There is great debate on today’s global warming issue, but the fact that energy consumption is a tremendous expense in most companies makes it a cost-reduction target that IT can help with — especially in organizations with large data centers and volumes of peripherals. Most astute CEOs and CFOs look at the cost percentage of certain items in regard to a percentage of revenue. Utility costs, such as electricity, gas, phone, and so on, are tangible operating expenses that can be managed more effectively, and tough economic conditions highlight these expenses. Tremendous savings are possible with a solid strategy to manage these areas better.

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• The next financial crisis will be the growing amount of personal credit accruing in the U.S. and the hope that consumer spending will buy us out of the current crisis. When this set of cards tumbles it will be harder on everyone: look for an even greater dip in the markets and tighter credit markets than we’ve seen in the last year. The recommendation: buy hardware and software you think you need now, just do it with "free cash."

• Companies that were agile before the crisis will survive the upcoming financial challenges better -- they will struggle, but their collaborative nature will help them discover the emerging ideas in a tough market.

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• I see the U.S. software industry, in 2010, will have an eroding share of the global software market's value because of lack of the right talent within the American workforce. It may seem unusual in an era of high unemployment to be talking about a labor shortage, but in 2010 I see the U.S. software industry will have an eroding share of the global software market's value because of lack of the right talent within the American workforce.

  In an era of unemployment heading over 10 percent, the U.S. has 1 million to 3 million vacant jobs, with 75 percent of those jobs technology-based. The pipeline of potential new talent is inadequate and America is not developing enough software experts. In contrast, Mexico graduates more engineers than the US (430,000 vs. 390,000), and the Mexico Ministry of Economy, in consensus with industry and government agencies related to the sector, has already committed to the development of the software industry in Mexico by nationwide deployment of Personal Software Process/Team Software Process through its PROSOFT initiative.

  We like technology, we use technology, and now technology is going to require more of us. 2010 will be the year organizations begin partnering in new and innovative ways with academia and government to better focus on training of software professionals.

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• Organizations will realize that relying on business processes as sole input into SOA is unrealistic. Business architecture, which provides a complete view of the business and incorporates capabilities, semantics, governance, processes and other essential views, will play an increasingly vital role in driving SOA, Cloud and other IT deployments.

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• Collaborative Business: I see that, within two years, "collaborative businesses" will mature fully. Business boundaries are already blurring and they will continue to merge further, resulting in few large conglomerates of businesses that will operate under the "industry" umbrella. This will result from Internet-based, high-speed, increasingly-reliable wired/wireless broadband communications networks coupled with maturing SOA-based interfaces and systems. To prepare, organizations should begin "business transformations" covering major business/strategic areas that revamp business portfolios towards "federated" products and services.

• Composite Methods: There will be an amalgamation of methods/processes/standards being used across all tiers of an organization over the next three years. Separate business management (e.g. SixSigma), governance (e.g. ITIL), project management (e.g. Prince2), software processes (e.g. RUP) and pure agile development (e.g. Scrum) will not exist as separate entities. Why? Organizations are a singular, large, globally spread entities that yearn to benefit by cohesive/unified IT performance. IT and business cannot be considered as two separable entities. We’ll see organizations creating repositories of all their methods/processes/standards and picking elements from these processes to create "composite agile" methods that will enhance business agility.

• Carbon Trading: Over the next 4 years, it will be a necessity for organizations to measure and monitoring carbon emissions. Carbon credits will be earned, stored and traded across stock markets making carbon a significant "currency." Business benefits and ROI will accrue from the ability to save, store and trade carbon. To prepare, organizations will need to update their Enterprise Architecture to "Green" EA; and undertake business analysis, modeling and documentation of carbon trading systems.

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• Thoughts on Knowledge Management in the next decade. Knowledge Management (KM) is slowly taking hold around the world. In the US most large organizations now have KM efforts. Whereas people-focused KM is not yet broadly adopted, much of KM will continue to be IT-based for communication and help functions. Advanced technology will increase for natural language understanding of documents for knowledge sharing and knowledge mining. Reliance on games and simulation-based KM applications for education and training will become increasingly important ranging from the current iPhone apps and military applications to curriculum-specific K-12 education applications to customized games and simulations for all walks of life. More US universities will offer graduate programs in KM.

  World-wide, the KM tendency is less technical. Instead KM focuses more on people and social aspects of work and intellectual capital. Increasingly, organizations and academia world-wide will increase their focus on intellectual capital and its role in making societies, organizations and people more competent for better performance -- in daily life, business, and in achieving societal goals. The emphasis and quality of academic work in developed nations and the BRIC nations are clear indicators of this direction.

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