Had my article on the future focus of IT development published by the Birmingham Post this week. The basic premise is that people should stop inventing better mousetraps and just concentrate on making the existing ones affordable, useful and reliable, and on integrating them into really useful systems. You can read the article in full.
Despite the article lead-in which says I say that there's nothing left to be invented, of course I still think there's lots to come, it's just that the "next big thing", real AI, or nano, or direct brain input etc - post-human technologies, are likely to be 10 - 20 years away from the next big discontinuity.
THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO INVENT –
NOW IT’S ALL ABOUT INTEGRATION
With the inventions and innovations of the past few years all the major IT building blocks are now in place, so the next challenge for the IT industry is to provide businesses with existing technologies that work smoothly together.
David Burden, Marketing Director at Aseriti, the Birmingham-based IT services and solutions company, believes that the power of the Internet, mobile phones, broadband and wireless technology need to be harnessed together to provide the most successful solutions.
David comments: “Within the context of contemporary IT there’s nothing left to be invented! Integration is the future of the IT industry, simply because we have all the major technologies needed to take the next steps.
“It shouldn’t matter what device you use or where you are, because we should all be able to get to the same information or the same application, resulting in computing that is a seamless part of the environment. True martini systems – anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
“For over 50 years now computers have dictated to users how they should interact, and what they can do. We can now have, and should now demand, the ability to be in control of the interaction.
“The coming of the world-wide web created a dramatic change in how we use IT. At first it brought us information from across the globe, then e-mail, and before long we were using it to buy books, download music, watch web cams and order our groceries.
“In business the change has been slower but we are seeing a steady move towards web-centric computing as corporate Intranets evolve into corporate web portals.
“Alongside the rise of the Internet has been the rise of the mobile phone, while the latest stars in this firmament are broadband and Wi-fi. And it is the combination of the latter two that offers real power – and the real potential for change.
“Businesses are finding broadband increasingly important – allowing simple e-mail communication with ever larger attachments, rapid research on the web to help buy or sell in the most cost effective way, and overall building a stronger and richer link to their customers, their market and their community.
“With Wi-fi we can take that fixed, broad Internet connection and extend it to any wireless user in our vicinity. At work we can sit in any meeting room and access our files, our applications, or the web – we can check facts and make changes, making better and faster decisions. At leisure we can access the Internet from railway stations, coffee shops, shopping malls or even all around the house or garden.
“Over the past five years we’ve seen PC prices at least halve, and give five times the power in the process. Wi-fi has also crashed in price over the last 12 months.
“And there are a whole host of other technologies waiting in the wings, including virtual reality, speech recognition and smart robots.
“We are certainly not all using all of this technology every day. Some is only just emerging from the lab, and some you can buy but is so bug ridden or user hostile that only the earliest of adopters will pay for it, but it’s all there.
“The challenges which face the IT community now are four fold. We need to make new systems and technologies usable, affordable, useful, and ensure that they are all integrated.
“Technology has to do things that businesses want done. At work it has got to make it easier to sell, cheaper to make, and quicker to gain competitive advantage. The greatest challenge for the IT industry is to integrate technologies to make good systems, and integrate good systems to make powerful environments.”
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