An attempt to pull together some of the constraints and drivers for the workplace of the future...

I mentioned that I was giving a presentation this week at the New Horizons Forum at the AIAA conference. Since it may provide some useful insight about the research underway at HP labs in a larger context, here is the content of one slide from that presentation:

1 datum is a point

2 data are a line

3 data are a trend

100 data are a picture

Having sensors to generate the data that fuels a more proactive business is important, but there is more to sensing than the sensors and the data collected. A holistic ecosystem view is needed. Unfortunately, this means that the tools of today may not be up to the tasks required.

You may have heard about HP’s efforts to place a million node sensor network in the ground for Shell, gathering seismic information. Traditionally, this kind of information was just a flash of perspective taken in the dark from a few locations. Instead, this sensing effort with Shell generated a much more fine-grained view, taken from a myriad of angles, to understand in-depth what was underground. 

In order to do implement the system, HP not only had to invent the sensors (relatively cheap and yet very sensitive MEMS devices), but we also create the networking and management techniques to make it useful. Building upon what we’ve learned, we’ve been researching whole new approaches to information storage and computation that will be required to generate value from massive amounts of information.

HP has many of the foundational patents on memristor devices and sensing techniques and we should soon see the shift in storage and computing that the implementation of these techniques should enable. The whole concept of computing will likely need to bow to the onslaught of information from sensing and the related metadata, changing how information is transferred within the computing environment -- shifting from computing on bits to analyzing information in graphs on highly parallelizes computing platforms: Cog Ex Machina

In addition, research is underway to understand how information can be analyzed, automated and displayed. New techniques can be applied to focus attention on the areas needing the creativity that people can provide.

In the marketplace, last year was the year of Big Data as a buzzword with its primary focus on generating insight from the massive amounts of information being collected. Frankly, that will not be enough for the future envisioned – we need to shift the focus to time-to-action, not insight and that is what many of our research efforts underway will enable.

One of the items I mentioned in the predictions for 2013 post was “disruptive display technologies” breaking out in 2013.

Here are a couple of slideshows from CIO magazine that show some perspectives about:

• The future of wearable computers
• The future of human computer interfaces

That may give you some ideas… about where these chnages may impact business.

If 2011 was the year of transformation and 2012 was the year of disruption, I believe that 2013 will be a year of expectation – changing expectations in IT. A year when many of these trends I’ve posted about really hit home. I’ll use the links in this post to provide the background context for these predictions.

Security is shifting with more threats from more sources and the realization that everyone gets hacked. Organizations will have a higher expectations of security based on what everyone has experienced and learned.

The industry has been talking about mobile devices, sensors and using networks to pull data from the edge and so now they’ll look to do something with all this data.

The market has talked about having software defined networks to make communications as virtualized and flexible as the computing infrastructure, now this versatility will become an expectation.

As organizations inch their way out of this incessant economic downturn, they will need new techniques that give greater insight on performance and satisfaction. This means that IT organizations will need to expand their definition of “customer” to include suppliers, partners, consumers and anything/one that can make a difference. 2013 will be a year where the constraints of the past need to be broken and organizations will be expected to look beyond whatever hinders innovation and the generation of greater value.

We can expect to see bigger data and even bigger storage, with copious amounts of information coming from more sensors in more places. Organizations will no longer be satisfied with using only 3-5% of the data available. Beyond being more of it, the information collected will be of a wider variety (including video, sound…) so transforming the information from one format to another and back will be increasingly important. I think more importantly – there will be a greater understanding and expectations of the value of the metadata – who is sending what to whom, when and what is the driving intent. After all, people do not really make decisions based on the data, they make decisions based on the context the data describes. The expertise for those that understand both the information and how it can be applied to the business goals of the day will be in highest demand. The whole concept of ‘In Memory’ computing will be up for a shift in expectations for where and how it is used – although that one might need to wait for 2014.

We’ll also see these devices in the field used for more functions – like the wide spread acceptance of new and improved NFC capabilities for payment and identity. The Internet of Things (IoT) will become just the Internet. Individuals will be able to add IoT capabilities independent of the original manufacturer, if desired. Although enterprises may still be crawling their way to the IoT, consumers will embrace IoT in 2013.

I also fully expect a couple of different disruptive display technologies in 2013 to shift our thinking about where and when a display is needed (or even possible).

One of the other core shifts in expectation will be around simplicity. The current solutions are just too complex. We can’t skimp on security, connectivity and collaboration, yet the interface needs to be made simpler, not ever more visibly complex. Attention engineering techniques that I’ve been talking about for about a decade will become more prevalent, since they will address the scarcity of this scarce resource. This expectation will be fueled by the IoT, big data, computing and new display technologies. We’ll see this talked about more explicitly in 2013.

The expectation will be that there is more opportunity than ever in 2013. There will be new hardware capabilities announced that will store and compute more with less impact on the ecology around us. The inherent capabilities of the world around us will increase as well so that we’ll collaborate or even negotiate more with our devices as well as the people around us. The concept of human augmentation of automation will be significantly less foreign at the end of 2013 than it is today.

Last year, I made some predictions about the shift in organizations applications portfolio assessments and the adoption of enterprise stores, I was probably a year premature on that one, so 2013 will likely be the year when these long term issues come home to roost. Organizations need to prune their tree of applications, if they expect new capabilities and innovation to bloom. There is just not enough budget to innovate and also feed the drain from low value solutions, just because we’ve supported them for so long. Enterprises also still have the issue that most of the apps in production can’t really unleash the power of the cloud. 2013 should see new tools and techniques to address this potential.

That is where the issue of scarcity and abundance becomes so important in 2013. We need to maximize the use of what’s abundant to maximize the value of what’s scarce – do even more with more. Organizations need to start to look for, measure and actively address these resource consumption issues.

Some of the top trends of 2012 moving into 2013:

• Cloud – Cloud is almost an expectation already, although I think there will be a shift to a greater industry specific expectation out of cloud service providers. The days of the generic, industry independent solution where the service provider doesn’t care how or what’s consumed may be over. PaaS will move into an industry specific space. The expectations for the service provider to have greater skin (read as IP) in the game will be an expectation. I also see the automation techniques learned from the IT process automation we call ‘cloud’, starting to expand out into other business processes that need this level of automation and attention engineering.
• Mobility –  will move beyond smart phones into other experience access points. I fully expect that this means IT will begin to see ways to virtualize the mobile experience in new, secure and innovative ways. It’s about the access to the corporate information, not about the device and when it is about devices, it is about the personal cloud of devices, not just one.
• Big Data – for me this was the big buzz word of 2012. The concerns will move beyond the raw data and focus will turn to the metadata, mentioned above. As mentioned earlier - context is king. The skills within the organization will be a tremendous constraint and the diversity of skills will extend as well. Gamification, as an example, is a skill that will be recognized and move hand-in-hand with a big data strategy.

One area where I believe expectations will shift tremendously in 2013 is in a new understanding of personalization. Using the contextual information available from big data and the need for attention engineering, individuals and corporations will have greater expectation on how information is delivered to them. Although 2013 may be too soon, there will also be a shift in how products are personalized as 3D printing moves out of limited use and becomes significantly more mainstream with some parts of the world having 3D printing capabilities as a local service. 3D printing helps address the fact that the cost of transportation is going to have an increased impact on who, makes what where. This may be even further out, but the concept of personalized medicine, tuned to an individual’s genetic makeup will be in the news much more in 2013. All of these things are variations of a shift in understanding and expectation of what personalization will really mean.

Although nothing ever really goes away in IT, there will be some areas that IT organizations will see reduced demand. One will be the bare metal OS. It is almost gone on servers and I fully expect that in 2013 you’ll see it head for the exit on phones and other non-dedicated mobile devices. Virtualization just makes too much sense at so many levels. IPV4 is another technology whose time is waning. Sure it will be around for a very long time – forever! But the excuses to not implement IPV6 may have run their course and now is the time.

I’ve mentioned before that the CIO’s role is changing and there are some CIO activities that likely need to be dropped. For the personnel in the organization, there needs to be a realization that automation is the new off-shore – embrace it and internalize what it may mean to your career.

One last area I almost forgot was the battle over Internet censorship and control which we’ve just started to hear more about in the last few months will reach new heights in 2013. Both governments and activists will be flexing their muscles and putting a strain on the open Internet that so much of our work is based upon. Keep an eye on this issue, since we all have a great deal riding on it.

As I ended my post for 2012 -- those who can have the vision, will be in for quite a ride this year.

By the way we’re going to have a twitter chat on 2013 Technology resolutions - December 12, 2012 noon US central. Use tag #HPESchat. Share what you see in store for 2013.

In the past, I’ve written a few posts about graphene and future semiconductor materials. I saw this week that Vinnie put out a post: The next graphene?

Its focus was on molybdenum disulfide as a transparent alternative for logic and display circuits. The MIT researchers say the material could be used for radically new products, from whole walls that glow to clothing with embedded electronics to glasses with built-in display screens. They developed some sample integrated circuits.

The semiconducting nature of MoS2 overcomes the shortcomings of zero-band gap graphene, while still sharing many of graphene’s advantages for electronic and optoelectronic applications. There have been approaches to develop a band gap with graphene, but using another material may be more practical.

Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Academia Sinica in Taiwan were also involved. The work was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation Focus Center for Materials, the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Laboratory.

The reason this may be important for information technology in the coming decades is that these thin and flexible techniques can be applied to almost anything, provided ubiquitous sensing and computing capabilities.

The illustration is from Han Wang et al. at MIT.