"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" (William Gibson).
Because a technology is futuristic does not mean it has no value for you. The future may be here but not necessarily in your backyard. Message to tech watchers: find out where the future is!
Examples: Netflix (with algorithm design challenge), sensor and meshing techniques (reducing damage in supply chain), sentiment analysis in blogs, microblogs... (problem resolution), surface computing (customer service), robotics (warehous efficiency). It shows uses of early adoption of imature technologies.
The 2009 Radar Screen includes only a selection of technologies:
Social software is a hot topic in organizations. Different interesting trends: collective intelligence and crowdsourcing (open innovation, collecting information, deliver solutions that are in search of a problem...), internal collaboration (process of idea + feedback + collaboration), KM platforms (social analysis).
Cloud Computing is going to be very important (it has its own hype cycle). There are low-maturity trends coming (AD tools, cloud busting, virtual private cloud, governance).
Statistical AI has been a huge disappointment but there are improvements in some domains, based on massive statistical analysis (the way to enable it has changed): speech recognition, machine translation, image recognition. There is synergy between statistical analysis and crowdsourcing.
Real world web: integrating the physical world in the digital world (with location, object identification, sensor networks...). "Illuminating information shadows". It will help in the supply chain.
Context-aware computing is very interesting, especially in the mobile world. It will allow hyper-personalization. It will get more sophisticated in the future (contextual cloud services...). Mostly for consumer-facing services.
Augmented reality is done in various ways: mobile apps (using location) or projections in the real world (see MIT video).
User interfaces are bound to evolve rapidly: touch interfaces, new display technologies, tangible interfaces (Oblong? Minority Report-like), emotional-aware (EML from W3C), 3-D. IN the long term, the UI will start to be extracted from the device it is attached to.
3-D printing has been on the list for some time. It is being used but it is expensive. The prices are going down (from 200 k$ to 20 k$ then soon at 5 k$. Programmable matter: small pieces dynamically reassembling.
Robotics are used in warehousing, for telepresence in hostile environments...
What people are doing with emerging technologies (based on a broad survey, not only Gartner clients)?
Most Adoption
- Collaboration technologies have been adopted (videoconferencing, telepresnece, IM...)
- PC virtualization is starting to appear
- Simple social software (blog, wiki) are strong, others are much weaker
- Sensor and mesh network used but not popular
- Virtual worlds not much adopted
- Cloud technologies
- Biometrics
- PC virtualization
- Some collaboration and communication technologies
- UI and multitouch
- More advanced social software
Who is responsible for looking at emerging tech? Most respondents (more in type A organizations) have a full-time permanent group and this has grown from 2005 levels. Very few companies have no one in charge.
In the recession the focus has changed from innovation (and business value) to cost reduction.
Take away:
- Look at cloud computing
- Look at the things you might be missing in the ET group (with the hype cycle)
- Think context, new displays, interfaces...
- Make sure you have a strategy
No comments:
Post a Comment