The development of technology in the new decade: from the cloud to the disappearance of computers and the heyday of the era of robots

Summary: making short-term predictions about technology investments is relatively simple - trying to understand how the IT industry will evolve in the perspective of ten years is much more difficult.

For the industry, which, at least at first glance, is managed by logic and cold calculation, the technology industry is surprisingly easy to get excited and addicted to the next “ innovations that will change our future.”
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Perhaps this happens because, unlike, say, sales or HR, where innovations are determined by new management strategies, technological investments come “from the product”. Buying new hardware or software often entails the potential for a “disruptive” leap forward towards higher productivity or some other crucial business metrics. Technology providers, therefore, are rightly interested in promoting their products as actively as possible: the level of marketing costs and the involvement of users of some fast-growing technology firms can cause many consumer brands to become green with envy.

As a result, CIOs are seduced by a mass of constantly changing sets of “buzzwords” ( cloud services , wearable gadgets, the Internet of things - their well-known representatives) that the CIO has to weed out as a result of finding those concepts that will be really useful for their organizations and will be comparable to budgets of companies that are acceptable in time and adequate to the organization’s level of risk. Short-term decisions in this regard may be relatively obvious, but the further you look into the future, the harder it will be to predict who will emerge victorious from the competition.

Technological innovations in perspective from one to three years

Despite the possible fluctuations, the technologies that many CIOs plan to introduce in the near future are relatively risk-free - they are fairly safe. According to the TechRepublic study, the main investment priorities for the CIO in the coming years will be issues of improving security, mobility, using Big Data and cloud services for business. Fashionable directions like 3D printing or wearable gadgets will be at the end of the list.

Another study from Deloitte confirms this data: many of the technologies that CIO is currently launching as pilot projects and plan to implement in the near future have been around for quite some time - for example, business analytics, mobile applications, social media and tools for working with Large data. Augmented reality and gamification are considered lower priority technologies.

This assessment reflects the preferences of most CIOs who seek to focus on reliability as opposed to “disruptive” innovations: a TechRepublic study states that “protecting / securing networks and data” for technical managers who do not want to take another risk turns out to be more important than “ change in business requirements. "

Another important factor in this matter is money. Few CIOs have large budgets to spend on potentially unprofitable innovative projects, even if they want to (and many certainly remember the excesses of the dot-com era, and really don’t want to repeat their past mistakes).

According to a Deloitte study, less than 10% of the budget is allocated for technological innovations (CIOs who spend more on this area work in smaller and less conservative companies). There is another reason why CIOs are increasingly losing control over the budget allocated to innovation — this task is redirected to other business units (for example, the marketing department) who are considered to have a better understanding of the entrepreneurial approach to technology.



CIOs tend to blame their bosses for a conservative attitude to risk - according to them, this is the biggest limitation that prevents them from making riskier IT investments with the goal of higher growth and innovation. And although CIOs state that they are ready to take on the risks of IT investment, this attitude does not match the portfolio of current IT initiatives of most companies.

Another problem is that it is very difficult to estimate the return on investment in some technologies. Managers have always measured the benefits of such investments using the standard ROI formula, which includes only the most obvious costs: for example, the amount of payments based on the number of employees or the cost of new devices. But determining the return on investment in a project related to social media or the Internet of things is a much more difficult task.

Investments in technology in the medium term

If the investment plans of CIO in the short term remain conservative and tied to a limited budget, you should look a little further to understand where the new technological revolution can come from.

One of the resources that can be used is perhaps the best-known set of predictions about the future of IT: The Gartner technology maturity cycle , which reflects an attempt to assess the potential of new technologies, taking into account society’s expectations.

The graph divides technologies not only as to how large their acceptance is by the majority, but also in terms of expectations from them - thus it demonstrates what analysts call fundamental truth: the fact that we cannot but be fascinated by new technologies on the one hand, but on the other hand, we quickly cool down to them when we realize that it is extremely difficult to successfully implement them. Peak of excessive expectations is inevitably followed by getting rid of illusions, after which technologies finally enter the overcoming of deficiencies and fall on the productivity plateau.

“We observe this pattern of behavior in relation to virtually all technologies - this is an up and down movement from expectations to getting rid of illusions and a final increase in productivity,” said Jackie Finn, vice president and analyst at Gartner, who has been working on the project since the first Technology Maturity Cycle , published 20 years ago. She considers this cycle as an example of a person’s reaction to any novelty.

“This is not only about technology as such - we react to every innovation. This approach is also maintained in relation to new directions in management and work on projects. People told me that this is also true in private life - the initial wave of enthusiasm, the realization that everything is much more complicated than it seemed, and the final understanding of what is needed for everything to work as it should. ”



Gartner's 2014 technology maturity cycle

According to Gartner's forecasts for 2014, the directions that will reach the Plateau of productivity over the next two years (where they become widely applicable) are, in particular, speech recognition and in-memory computing technology.
Within the next 5-10 years, the forecasts include virtual reality, cryptocurrency and wearable user interfaces.

It is most difficult to understand when the technology will be successfully used as a mass product, and that is why CIO needs to successfully choose the time to invest. Some of the technologies that Gartner noted on their first maturity curve in 1995 — such as speech recognition and virtual reality — still remain on the 2014 curve, and have not become mainstream.



Gartner's 1995 technology maturity cycle

These types of user interface technologies took time to grow, says Finn. For example, voice recognition initially appeared in heavily structured call center applications, but in its latest incarnation — Siri — the technology advanced significantly, “although it has not yet become a universally applicable interface type,” she adds.

Virtually all technologies go through these “roller coasters” because our attitude towards new concepts does not change, explains Finn. “This is a congenital psychological reaction - we are inspired when we see something new. What attracts us is partly connected with the structure of our brain: we are interested in the first part of the cycle, in which new technologies seem curious and exciting; but with the onset of the second part, the hard work begins, which we like much less. ”

But despite the fact that it is impossible to break out of this cycle, CIOs can use concepts like this to manage their own aspirations: if the company's investment strategy assumes that the company consistently starts working with new technologies at the peak of expectations from them (remember, several years ago Did each CEO have their own blog?) Perhaps it’s time to review the strategy, even if the pressure from colleagues on the CIO makes it difficult.

Finn: “This pressure - the feeling that if you don’t do this, you don’t get anything - really exists. Assess at what point the new technology adds value to your business, and if this does not happen, then it will be quite normal to enter the majority later and allow others to fill the bumps, if for you this direction is not particularly critical. ”

Going further, it is worth noting that technologies that, according to Gartner, will not become mainstream after 10 years, are more likely to be science fiction: these are, for example, holographic displays, quantum computing and human augmetic (mechanical body modifications). The analysis of this curve is an entertaining process of studying the near future of technologies, from relatively well-known to completely exotic. “Employers will need to weigh the pros and cons of augmetics versus the growing capabilities of working robots, including because the use of robots does not affect the ethical and legal side of the issue, unlike augmetic,” Gartner said.

Room for futurists

Beyond the 10-year horizon, you find yourself in an area in which primarily futurists work, studying the development of technology.

Steve Brown, a futurist at Intel, said that within 10 years the future of computing will determine three mega-trends. "They are very simple - this is a decrease, an increase and naturalness," he says.

“Reduction” is a consequence of Moore’s law; this trend will determine the development of small, low-power devices and will significantly increase the likelihood of the spread of wearable gadgets and the Internet of Things. “Increase” refers to the continued growth of computer power, and “naturalness” is a state in which objects of everyday life will be endowed with some computational power.

“The calculations were our final destination: [earlier] you had to go somewhere in order to carry them out - for example, into a room with a huge humming computer that you needed to serve - to get there, you had to get lucky. And then there came an era in which calculations were made possible on the go, ”says Brown.

“In the next era, calculations will be built into the world around us - as soon as you can achieve this, you will eventually make all things around you able to make calculations - you can turn everything into a computer. And as soon as this happens, extremely interesting things will start to happen, ”Brown continues.

At this stage, the computing power will cause a new series of problems for business management, Brown notes. The challenge for CIOs and enterprise architects will be that, having made everything capable of computing, they will have to decide how to use it. "In the future, we will face philosophical questions that you will have to answer before deploying a new technology," commented Brown.



He foresees the emergence of a world of ubiquitous computing power in which robots can observe and understand all the processes taking place around.

“Autonomous machines will change everything, ” he says. “Enterprises will face difficulties when people will have to work side by side with machines — both with physical machines and algorithms. It will not be easy for companies to find the most effective solution to a particular task, which will consist of human work and processes that can be optimized in one way or another with the help of algorithms. ”

The pace of technological development is accelerating: where it took us decades to make decisions, now processes are moving faster and faster, Brown says. And all this means that we need to make better decisions about how to use new technologies, and will have to face even more complex issues related to security and information protection.

“If we use this or that technology, will it improve us?” We all have to decide in advance what to use to get better. At the enterprise level, we will need to determine what we are achieving and how we want to work. ”

It's not just about programs and hardware

For many organizations, a barrier to this wonderful future is their own personnel and the methods of work adopted by the company. Determining what to invest in can be much easier than convincing the staff and the organization as a whole to change the usual format of activity.

“We need to define the essence of the relationship between people and technology, because now the vast majority of people perceive technology incorrectly,” says Dave Koplin, head of Microsoft’s forecasting department (he says this is a rather ironic name for his position).

Koplin notes that many of us seek to use new technologies to perform tasks in the usual way, the way they have been done over the years, while the essence of new technologies is to make us fundamentally change the approaches to performing tasks. A classic example is the concept of productivity: “We had to reconsider our attitude towards productivity. Unfortunately, many people believe that productivity is a process: the better I perform the process, the more productive I am. This shifts the focus of our attention, because in reality, productivity is associated exclusively with improved performance. ” Three quarters of employees believe that a productive day at the office is to look at and answer all the backlog of letters, he notes.



Developing more literate relationships with technology is necessary because of impending serious changes, Koplin notes: “What happens when technology moves into the background, what happens when every surface has the opportunity to display contextual information based on what is happening around and who looks at her? This is the world to which we are moving - a world where the data will expose many ethical issues. If we do not prepare people for these changes, we will never be able to make the most of them. ”

Nicolas Millyar, a futurologist from the telecom industry giant, BT, echoed these ideas, saying that the CIO will have to take into account not only technological changes, but also their impact on staff: lengthening the length of service will require the creation of technologies that will be suitable and young staff, and people over 70. This entails rethinking the concept of an employee’s workplace: “Open space without partitions can distract employees from work,” he says, “But is it possible to generate innovations in a gray corner? Employees using tablets may prefer to work without using traditional desks, and those who will use devices that respond to gestures may need more space. Even the role of a manager can change - it will be less connected with assignment of tasks and control over their implementation, and to a greater degree will be similar to the duties of a “party master”: the manager will look for employees with the most appropriate combination of skills to perform a certain job. ”

In the long run, not only the technologies themselves will change dramatically: employees and managers will also have to form a new type of thinking.