10 Strategic Tech Trends For 2017: Gartner
At the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo, Gartner released its annual list of the top 10 strategic trends. Are you planning for the right technology in your organization?
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Thousands of IT and business executives gathered in Orlando last week for this year's Gartner Symposium ITxpo. The annual event is the occasion for many business meetings, countless conversations over coffee and in hotel alcoves, and conference rooms packed with those eager to hear what Gartner analysts think about the industry of today -- and tomorrow.
There was no shortage of predictions at the conference. There rarely is a prognostication drought at a conference organized by analysts. One of the major sets of predictions, though, was the list of top strategic tech trends. These are the big, broad trends Gartner thinks executives should keep in mind as they're making plans and building business strategies for the coming years.
[See 9 Reasons DevOps Is a Dirty Word.]
One of the things that you'll note as you go through the list is the idea that the world in which we live and work is growing smarter. From a very high level of strategy, the question for executives is how to take advantage of all that intelligence in light of the absolute certainty that executives at competitor companies are working to take advantage of the increased environmental intelligence.
Will you have to build a complete strategy based on all 10 of these trends? Of course not. Some will be key to your business. Some you can be aware of, but not put at the center of your work. Some (this is the nature of prediction) will fade or be overtaken by other technologies before you have to decide one way or the other.
What's your take on the list? Have you already begun to build strategies based on some of these technologies? Which do you think are most likely to fade or be overtaken? We've heard from the analysts at Gartner. Let us know what you think the strategic technologies will be in the coming years.
Neither AI nor machine learning are new technologies. There's nothing new or surprising in the notion that they are going to become more important. What was surprising at the Gartner Symposium was the extent to which people accepted AI as a factor in almost every system that will be created in the coming decade -- and the degree to which they assume that machine learning will be a key method for systems to build knowledge bases. How many machine trainers are in your staff projections?
Not all machine learning and AI will be directed at humans. Some systems will use their intelligence to interact with other systems. But plenty of machine intelligence will be employed in intelligent apps that augment human intelligence in different ways. From personal virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to calendars that figure out what you need to know about the other attendees in your next meeting, the apps you use are going to be increasingly intelligent in the coming years.
From industrial equipment to vehicles to light bulbs, the physical things that make up our environment are becoming more intelligent. Some of that intelligence will be used to improve the experience humans have in relating to the items, but some will be used for these smart things to communicate and coordinate with other intelligent things. One of the important pieces of this trend as described by Gartner is the increase in intelligent network applications as the intelligent things form intelligent networks and intelligent ecosystems.
If you want to find people using Oculus Rift headsets, you might avoid game gatherings in favor of big data conferences. Virtual reality is being explored by companies looking for better big data analysis, while augmented reality is already being used in industrial applications. Both virtual and augmented reality are part of the push to make the experience of interacting with computer systems more immersive and more readily understandable in complex situations.
A static model won't work to accurately represent a dynamic system. Dynamic models that can respond to environmental changes in real-time form digital twins that can be used to predict maintenance windows, anomalous behavior, and manufacturing efficiencies. Artificial Intelligence systems will use digital twins informed by machine learning as critical components in systems that augment human decisions and improve human processes.
When trust is crowd-sourced and widely distributed, it can change the face of the financial system. Blockchain is in the early days of transforming financial encounters, but some analysts are already looking ahead to a time when blockchain's crowd-sourced trust is used to transform other activities from economic prediction to computer security.
It's not only that a growing number of people are using speech as a primary means of interacting with their computers. It's also that the computer systems are using tools like chatbots to initiate the conversational interaction with humans. It's unlikely that speech will completely replace keyboards and typing for all computer interaction. However, many users will find most of their computer work transacted by voice in the near future.
Applications rarely exist in isolation any more. Instead, the mesh app and service architecture (MASA), in which an array of end-use apps making use of a constellation of back-end applications and services, is becoming the norm. In this model, connections are as important as elemental functionality, and data-sharing is as important as data processing.
In the keynote address at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2016 the research firm identified five platforms on which the digital business rests. Those platforms are: information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence, the IoT, and business ecosystems. These form both the foundation upon which the IT function rests and the building blocks of the IT infrastructure.
Ready for some more non-news? IT security is becoming more complex. Hackers are getting better, and the stakes are getting higher. If your organization is going to have a chance of keeping up, it's going to have to produce and employ security systems that adapt to new threats at machine speed. Humans, for all our virtues, are simply not fast enough to keep up. We can be creative, but it's time to let the computers take care of themselves.
There they are -- 10 strategic tech trends for the coming year. What's your take on these trends? Are they strategic enough? Do you wish we have covered the one big thing we missed? Which items should we have on the list for next time? There are more lists to come. Start the conversation on this one in the comments below.
Ready for some more non-news? IT security is becoming more complex. Hackers are getting better, and the stakes are getting higher. If your organization is going to have a chance of keeping up, it's going to have to produce and employ security systems that adapt to new threats at machine speed. Humans, for all our virtues, are simply not fast enough to keep up. We can be creative, but it's time to let the computers take care of themselves.
There they are -- 10 strategic tech trends for the coming year. What's your take on these trends? Are they strategic enough? Do you wish we have covered the one big thing we missed? Which items should we have on the list for next time? There are more lists to come. Start the conversation on this one in the comments below.
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