ITS News

Twenty billion devices connected to the Internet by 2015. Smartphones eclipsing PCs as the primary internet gateways. Those are a few of the scenarios envisioned by Steve Prentice, VP of Research and Distinguished Analyst for Gartner.

Prentice delivered his presentation, entitled Technology, Business, & Society: The Future of IT, Oct. 5 at Sarratt Cinema. Click to view his slides and notes.

Prentice paints an Information Technology future vastly different than that of today. IT’s impact on society and business will be tremendous. More and more human interaction will occur online as opposed to face-to-face. As technology erodes geographic barriers, people from different countries will have ever greater interaction.

The IT technological revolution will reach maturity near the year 2030, Prentice believes. There will be an erosion of the work/home distinction. Consumers will typically have more computing power/bandwidth at home than at the office.

Computer storage capabilities will skyrocket as memory prices fall. As a result, heat generation and power consumption will be greater concerns than the cost of hardware, leading to the rise of environmentally-friendly products and “green IT.”

Even as Information Technology becomes more ingrained in business, IT organizations in midsize and large corporations will shrink 30%  in the next five years, according to Prentice. With maturity, the focus will shift from infrastructure and services to information design, process design, and relationship and sourcing management. Eventually IT as a discipline will disappear.

The threat and damage possible from data terrorism will increase. Open source will grow. Software will become a service. Virtualization and Tera-Architectures will be new buzzwords. Broadcast media as we know it will break down.

And the network finally becomes the computer.

But even as our world goes through great changes, some constants will remain, according to Prentice. Reputation and ethics will be increasingly important. And consumers will unerringly punish bad design and unethical behavior while rewarding “cool,” seamless online experiences.