What is the future of the IT department?

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The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving.

One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs to deal with the minutiae of technological change as well as the macrotrends shaping organizations and their shifting place in the global economy.

I’ve teamed up with the outstanding strategist Greg Rippon of NetFocus, who I first worked with back in 1999 on a broad-ranging scenario project for a major bank, to create a one-day workshop for IT departments who want to take a structured look at the future and what it implies for their current strategy.

Click on the image for the flyer for the workshop on the future of the IT department.


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Tablet Opportunities for News Publishers: the transformation continues

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We see the nexus of the rise of tablets and the transformation of media as one of the most fascinating and important topics today. It continues to be a key focus for us in our client work and own projects.

This week International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA) released its Tablet Opportunities for News Publishers report, which is free to members and $295 for others. In the report, “dozens of leading news industry executives reveal their up-to-the-minute thinking“.

I was quoted throughout the report, and they also included our iPad Media Strategy Framework, as below, to encapsulate the key themes.

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Click on image for full-size pdf

Here are some of my quotes and thoughts included in the report:

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The evolution of search will refine the spectrum of quality in media

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Search is not getting better, or it certainly seems that way. In the evolutionary battle between search engines and search engine marketers, the search engines are not keeping ahead, and crap content is finding its way into the top of search results. This makes search users unhappy, opens the way for alternatives to the dominant player in the Western world, AKA Google.

In a blog post on search engine spam by its principal engineer Matt Cutts Google says it is ready to respond, in particular to filtering out low-quality content. He says:

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago.
…
However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months.

To the first point, people’s expectations are continually getting higher, and so they should be. And it turns out that people’s perception that the problem is getting worse is true.

Google’s response is two-fold: cracking down on duplicate content, and downgrading in search results what Google algorithmically determines to be “low quality content”. The video describes Google’s initial changes on this front that happened around 1 May of last year.

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The 9 kinds of context that will define contextual search

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Yesterday I did the kick-off presentation and workshop at a strategy planning session of a major online media company. The intent was to provide some different perspectives on trends in digital media as input to their deliberations.

One of the many topics I discussed was the rise of contextual search.

Looking back over the last decade, I think it’s fair to say that the search experience has not evolved much. Sure we’ve had the shift to real-time indexing, experiments with multi-category results, predictive text in the search field, and a few other innovations, but if I was sitting in 2001 wondering how search would develop over the next 10 years I would be sorely disappointed to find out how little actually happened in that time.

Clearly it is a nonsense to always get the same search result, irrespective of who you are and all of the conditions surrounding the search. Yet for all major search engines there is currently minimal difference in the results from the same text string search performed by different people, in different conditions, very likely looking for different things.


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Why is the technology world so obsessed with fruit?

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This is a classic. The One Ronnie show on BBC has an awesome skit playing on how current technology is so often described by fruit.

I laughed until I cried.

11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011

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Our recently launch Map of the Decade triptych comprised three parts: the Map of the Decade, details on the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011.

I think may have been a mistake to put the Map of the Decade and Zeitgeist themes in the one document, as many only see the front page and don’t get to the Zeitgeist themes, and they come from quite different perspectives (1 year as against 10 years). As such, I’ve taken out the Zeitgeist themes here, with the image and full text below. Click on the image to download the complete pdf – go to page 3 for descriptions of the Zeitgeist themes.

Zeitgeist for 2011

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ZEITGEIST:2011

1. Networked or Not?

We are all facing a fundamental choice that will shape our lives. Many dive headlong into a world of always-on connection, open social networks, and oversharing. A few cry halt and choose to live only in the old world of tight-knit personal communication. The result is a divided society.

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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011

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It is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come.

We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape.

Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world of MegaTrends. Exa is the prefix meaning 10 to the power of 18, following Mega, Giga, Tera, and Peta. As such Exa is Mega cubed.

Download the pdf of the framework by clicking on any of the images. The full text of the ExaTrends and the Zeitgeist themes is below.

Map of the Decade: 2010s

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Transparency has long been driving business and society… but it’s only just begun

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One of the most surprising things about Wikileaks is that it took this long for the massive shift to transparency to have an impact on this scale. The trend to transparency has long been evident, and sites to facilitate leaks have been around for many years now. The inevitability of a transparent world has long shaped my thinking about the future.

In my 2002 book Living Networks, the final chapter was on the future of a networked world. The second of my ten predictions was: Transparency will drive business and society.

Even before the book came out I spoke at KMWorld in Silicon Valley on Creating the Transparent Corporation, and given my background in capital markets, I have been interested in and written and spoken about transparency in investor relations from the 1990s with the rise of intangibles reporting and beyond to the impact of the rise of social media.

One of the facets in my widely read 2006 article Six Facets of the Future of PR was Transparency is a given, while one of my Seven Megatrends of Professional Services was Transparency.

In both of these papers, as in a number of keynotes I gave earlier in the decade, I mentioning the now-defunct corporate leaks site internalmemos.com, which was launched in 2002, and had a significant impact for a number of companies (which are next target in line for Wikileaks and its peers).

The full text of my 2002 prediction on transparency from Living Networks is here, with the full book chapter embedded at the bottom of the post.

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What TV will be like in 10 years: 7 opinions from media leaders

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German magazine Screen.TV recently asked 7 prominent media figures for their views on the future of TV:

“What will you watch on television in ten years, and what do you imagine your TV will look like?”

Here are our responses – links are translated by Google from the German:

– Jane Barratt, President, Young & Rubicam

– Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia

– Chuck Deckeris, CEO, Mediacom

– Chuck Porter, CEO Crispin, Porter & Bogusky

– Samir Husni, “Mr. Magazine“

– Ross Dawson, Futurist (this link to the German version as the original English is below)

– Eric Day, Director Brand Strategy, Microsoft Advertising

Here is my contribution in the original English:

The future of television is really the future of video, in which moving images from existing broadcast and cable TV merge with thousands of new channels, all intermingling across a plethora of devices. The power of television and great programming has been evident for decades, and is becoming even more pronounced as we shift into an all-embracing media economy.

At the same time an extraordinary growth of video content, ranging in quality from the abysmal to the transcendent, will add to create a potent mix for users.

In the home space we will have screens in most rooms, with our main media space generating a fully immersive experience that includes 3D without glasses and the ability to act out our own roles in TV programming. When we are out of the home, video glasses will sometimes be used to create a full screen experience, with rollable screens allowing pocketable devices to generate a rich video view.

While much television and video content will be time-shifted, the best video content distributors (remember this is a post-channel world) will build communities of viewers around live programming. Much of the future of television, and especially its revenue models, will revolve around community.

See my post yesterday on The Future of TV is community for more details on the last point.

Future Minds: the map of how screen culture is changing how we think

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My colleague Richard Watson, building on the success of his book Future Files, has now launched Future Minds, which explores how screen culture is changing the way we think today, and how it will shape our future.

When I read the Contents and Overture to Future Minds, my first thought was that Richard and I should organize a public debate. In contrast to Richard’s tone of caution I think there are immense opportunities in having our brains shaped by digital culture (though certainly also things to be wary of).

Here is the map that Richard has created to acccompany the book. I saw early drafts of this as long as a year ago, so this has definitely not been cribbed from other recent maps with a similar look and feel.

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Click on map to view as full-size pdf

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