EIs look ahead to 2018

Gartner has been talking for a while about the ‘Nexus of four forces – Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information”

Forrester warns “”Today’s Hottest Technologies Will Be Ho-Hum By 2015”

Many of the customers I have interviewed this summer for the book project would say Forrester is late by 2 years as they are already implementing uncertainty engines, semantic product memories, agile robots, next-gen cybersecurity etc.

At this rate of change, who has the courage to look 5 years out?

My Enterprise Irregulars colleagues do. I asked them to peer into their tarot cards and exotic crystals.

Here are some of their forecasts – not just IT centric

Dion Hinchcliffe

• Home automation/control of everything (Z-wave, Zigbee hubs and mobile apps)
• 3D printers will be used to print up many home repair parts + new use cases we can't imagine but suddenly want badly
• Google Glass-based devices will just be hitting mainstream (20M+ devices a year)
• TV/cable suddenly crumbles almost entirely to digital delivery over apps/IP-based devices
• Voice, gesture, and even some thought-based UXs actually work well and are widely used in everything
• My bank will at long last finally allow mobile check deposits <-- Outlier ;-)
• The advent of One Device for everything (phone, apps, SLR quality video/photos, wallet, remote controls, secure enough for BYOD at work, everything)
• And the One Device will have enough storage to hold every single digital asset we possess (and/or will make it seamless to the cloud)
• We are issued government digital identities and most Web sites require them for e-commerce, taxation, antiterrorism, censorship
• Recycling of old devices aging out of the cloud becomes a big business and/or mandatory in many places
• The Google of analytics rises (and it might even be Google), making #bigdata mainstream to the average person (querying/analyzing their life, both personal and professional)

And just as important what will be missing in 2018

• On-premise data centers
• Laptops as we know them
• Windows
• Half of the established large social networks
• Dedicated digital music players
• Patient-controlled health records
• An end to widespread extra-legal digital surveillance by government

Tom Raftery

• Connected cars with built-in analytics. EV's will also have advanced to take a significant share of the market share.
• Connected homes, with analytics, energy storage and arbitrage
• Connected people, with e-health monitoring, environmental monitoring (and analytics!)
• better password management through combination of biometric technologies (voice & facial recognition, for example)

Phil Fersht

• robotic automation should have advanced a lot by then -
• you won't need (much) manual labor to process payroll, issue benefits statements, insurance claims, invoices, receivables, manage systems....

Sameer Patel

Network-first business software will drive a significant portion of cloud based software innovation. Network-first enterprise software delivers on the notion that the network is more utilized than the transaction or process elements to derive and deliver value.

Network-first enterprise software will come to a subset of software categories such as SFA, Talent Management, Supply Chain, Customer Service. We're now in the fist phase of this transition where we're embedding social software and your network inside traditional application software. This is a natural fist step as many organizations in the near term may not want to forklift incumbent transactional technology.

Early beta models of this that exist today are Ariba, Branchout, and others. A great example of this is Yelp where the power of the network and reviews now allows Yelp to let restaurants predict demand. Yelp built the network first, then monetized the "big data" and only last week got into the restaurant transaction business with the acquisition of seatme. And LinkedIn's network is of course, which already powers a lot of pre-sale conversations that is critical part of any CRM process.

Naomi Bloom

• fully voice response, non-intrusive, wearable devices that include most of what we now get from a combination of smartphone and content consumption tablets (as opposed to serious content creation and/or data analysis devices) and which are able to display needed images for others to see.
• breakthroughs in the technology of health management/wellness, e.g. using the "device" above reminding me when it's time to move, what's the calorie and nutritional content of what I'm about to eat, whether or not the water I'm about to drink is clean enough, and so much more. 

Esteban Kolsky

Wearable and embeddable

Steve Mann

Neural/computer interfaces....first for prosthetics and moving into even more advanced areas such as computation.   DARPA has a pilot project already in place for amputees.

Readers, throw in your forecasts below.