IT Trend Laws

[#1]

I had to give a talk about the top 3 IT trends at a conference about a year ago. I thought it was simple, Internet2, Unstructured Data Management and Ubiquitous Computing – wrong!

I sent out an e-mail survey to about two dozen respected IT professionals and asked them the same question. I was expecting to get a list of maybe 7-10 trends. Wrong again!

The list I got back had more than 50 trends. Here’s a short example of what I got back: Autonomic Computing, SOA, ebXML, Model-Drive Architecture, Business Process Monitoring, Smart Cards, Storage, Nanotech/MEMS, Micropayments, Biometrics, High Availability, and the list went on. What was interesting was that each of these trends was really important to one or two individuals – to them, it was the big thing.

So, what are the top 3 IT trends?

After a discussion about this issue with Jeff Wacker, I concluded that the problem was the level of abstraction. We need to think about IT trends at a higher level of abstraction. With this approach, the top 3 IT trends may really be: Visibility, Automation and Simplification.

Visibility suggests that IT systems try to provide greater access to information. So, trends such as VoIP, Security and Content management fall in this category.

Automation is about automating the manual and mundane tasks, letting people do something more important. Self-healing, Policy-Based Management and Machine Learning are examples of automation.

Simplification is about making IT less complex for both IT users and IT professionals. Examples of this category include SOA, Model-Driven Architecture and Biometrics.

Now we have our top 3 IT trends: Visibility, Automation and Simplification, which seem to capture the essence of most new IT solutions.

If true, I concluded the following laws for IT trends:

Law 1: IT advances in a direction to provide as much access to information, in as many modes, forms and granularity, as possible.

Law 2: IT advances in a direction to automate as many tasks as possible.

Corollary: When complying with Laws 1 and 2, IT invariably creates unmanageable complexity.

Law 3: IT advances in a direction to simplify itself.

What do YOU think?

[#2]

Interesting. It seems to me that the recent growth in business rules management systems comes from a desire to manage Law 2 and Law 3. Business rules allows IT to simplify itself (by making business logic easier to express, manage and evolve) and yet supports the desire to automate as many tasks as possible (more and more complexity is inherent in the tasks now being automated as the simple ones are done already).

[#3]

I like it - especially the explicit tension between the first two laws and the third. The first two can occur naturally and incrementally  - the third is always disruptive and innovative - whether on the tiniest scale like a developer deciding now is the time to refactor a big class, to the growing use of SOA to blackbox processes.

[#4]

I like your list, and have one addition / modification I would suggest.

I think the trend you refer to as Visibility is actually becoming something more than access... and perhaps something fundamentally different than access. In a nutshell, we are seeing a trend towards 'interactive access,' where people are not only finding data, but they now have the ability to add, delete, change, correct, etc that information.

I'm thinking of things like Wikipedia, Google Map Mashups, Ancient Spaces, etc...  

Thanks to the ubiquitity of Google, many people believe that immediate access to all the world's knowledge is basically a given (whether that is true or not is debatable). The new trend, however, is the ability to genuinely interact with that data / information / knowledge, contributing to it, tweaking it, making cool stuff out of it...

My point? Visibility is here already (and continuing to mature) - not sure I'd call it a trend as much as a present reality. Interactive Access, on the other hand, is a trend that is still in the process of taking off...

[#5]

useful way of classifying. But I would add a 4th trend - dramatic price/performance improvement. With prices of X86, broadband, global labor, SaaS at a fraction of what things cost 5 years ago, there is no reason for IT budgets to not shrink 10-15-20% a year. Much of those savings to date have gone in to vendor margin. In the next wave, they will be used to reduce  utility IT spend and free up budget to spend on some of the innovations you write about.

[#6]

I like your list, but I think Visibility (aka access) is more of a present reality than a future-looking trend.  Many internet users consider it a given that Google (for example) will give them immediate access to all the world's knowledge... and online banking, shopping, etc gets them everything else they need to know.

However, there is a new-ish trend that is emerging from the Visibility reality, and that is Interactive Access. Stuff like Wikipedia, Google Map mashups and Ancient Spaces let people not only see information, it lets them add, delete, create, contribute, rearrange, correct and generally do interesting things with the info.  This is a capability that's here today, but the full implications and applications have yet to unfold.

(my first attempt at leaving a comment didn't seem to work, so I'm trying again - my apologies if I end up with two similar comments).

[#7]

If IT didn't simplify, then it wouldn't advance.

It wasn't funny back in 2000 when my interviewers told me I wasn't technical enough. This because I was an old geek, old as back when things were harder. The real objection was that I was pre-Agile. The interviewer didn't see that what they did today was simpler.

But, then, there was a reason they couldn't see it, and that was that they were doing things we could have never done. They were doing things were the complexity of the automated domain increased, while the automaing domain had gotten simpler.

There will always be more difficult things to do. That's how you add value. Products enable or improve some dimension of performance, so we improve things or, again, do things we could have never done.

In knowledge management, knowledge consumes the unknow and converts it to the known. In IT, IT consumes the impossible and makes it possible.

[#8]

I would have thought convergence would be a major trend in IT, we only need to look at the increasing cross-over between telecoms, media, and IT applications.

Also, if we abstract away further and take a Schumpeterian viewpoint, perhaps it is worth attempting to take a look into the future at what the next techno-economic paradigm/Kondratieff wave may be?