EDS projects eight things to watch in IT 18 December, 2006 By Paul Weinberg

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(1) Short battery life on mobile computing devices is a major impediment to people working in 12 hour shift jobs.

"We have had a lot of conversations with police [for instance] about what you could do with a mobile device, and a mobile capability," stated Wacker.

(2) IT applications will increasingly be about 'context as well as content,' he stated. An early adopter is Google with its ability to track people's searches and base its advertising on the choices that are made.

(3) 'Monolithic' applications like ERP that prescribe one way to accomplish things are going to be replaced by more SOA based 'granular' apps. The later will allow users to use a portion of a solution that fits their needs.

(4) "Companies will have to take action on the sophistication and depth of the security violations that will be coming out in 2007," stated Wacker. The current focus on perimeter security is not sufficient to ward off external intruders invading a system and manipulating existing internal applications.

(5) More and more small and mid-sized companies will rely on third parties to manage elements of their IT infrastructure requirements.

(6) Simulation technologies that were originally developed in engineering will be used as a backup for decision-making. Human beings face a psychological limitation in terms of how much data they can fully assimilate, stated Wacker.

"The complexity of business these days exceeds the ability of human beings to make the kind of decisions that they need to make on a routine basis. We are starting to use IT, not to process data, but to process information into decisions."

But the EDS futurist told eChannelline that the scenario of an accidental unleashing of nuclear war by automated military machines of opposing nations, as envisioned in the classic movie Doctor Strangelove, would not be allowed to happen. Science fiction has done us a real favour in teaching us what to avoid, he continued. "We don't take the human hand off the helm. What we do is give the helm a heck of a lot more power, to control the larger scope of what humans need to do, in a faster way."

(7) Legacy applications are too expensive to maintain. "You cannot maintain those systems in a high growth environment," stated Wacker. He estimated that 85 per cent of corporate IT's budget involves maintenance. "What are we seeing is movement to a high degree of application modernization and applications rationalization. That is being able to understand and harvest the business rules, of what is actually happening in those old legacy things. But put them in a way that is highly changeable, highly flexible and highly efficient. That is not what we have right now."

(8) Mass marketers like Wal-Mart are suffering because they cannot offer what people individually want, stated Wacker. More successful are companies like Amazon, Google and E Bay that provide personalized services, he continued. The futurist offers the example of Amazon which automatically knows his book preferences when he goes online.

"We are starting to see personalized information systems in places like financial, travel and hospitality."