2013 – Five things that will not happen

It’s that time again when the PR world revolves around everyone and their dog making predictions for the coming year. As an analyst who likes to fight against marketing hype I feel compelled to add my thoughts to the mix. And being, by nature, a character who takes ‘Scrooge’ (Scrooge pictured, not Tony Lock) as a role model, here are my ‘thoughts’ of five things that will NOT take place in the year ahead.

• ‘Cloud’ will become the de facto model for IT service delivery for everything. IT departments will continue to delivery services in the most appropriate way that meets the needs of their users. Some internal, some from external resources. In fact, if anything, 2013 will be the year in which many organisations start to figure out that scaling out the use of cloud services across more than a handful of service providers is actually really difficult.  Integration, security management, data governance and, not least, supplier and contract management, will act as a natural break on cloud adoption until organisations figure out how to manage the complexity.

Freeform Dynamics Analysis – Private cloud forecast

• ‘Big data’ to become ubiquitous and any organisation not investing in it is on the slippery slope to oblivion. The concepts behind big data are interesting but the solutions are yet to be ‘industrialised’ enough for many organisations to use them in anger. In fact, organisations would be better advised to focus first on more fundamental data management integration challenges, which remain prevalent, and  improving their general capabilities around ‘analytics’ to help the organisation make better decisions more rapidly. And without enabling better internal and B2B process integration, advanced time analytics solutions often have little to act on.  Enhancing capabilities here can have more easily justified payoffs and deliver benefits more quickly.
• Everyone will be using only tablet / slates in their business lives. Nope – it’s a world of device plurality. Users will utilise a range of different devices to suit the work at hand and where they are working. This includes Windows PCs, which aren’t going away in a hurry. During 2013, more organisations will wake up to the challenges of dealing with a world in which end-point devices are the most volatile part of the IT equation, but few will start to address those challenges effectively.

Freeform Dynamics Analysis – Consumerisation of IT myths exposed

• The role of the CIO will fade away! With business ever more dependent on IT and at a time when delivery options are proliferating the role of the CIO will become more important, not less. I anticipate a shift in emphasis beginning to take place, in which the internal IT infrastructure and operational processes is used to create a ‘service hub’ for coordinating the use of internal and external resources. And going hand in hand with this, the role of the CIO will move towards service delivery management and helping the business ‘do more’.

• With everything coming from the ‘cloud’ (see the first bullet point above), IT departments will not be required. See the answer above.

Freeform Dynamics Analysis – The three immediate cloud opportunities

• Security breaches will escalate beyond control. Businesses have always been attacked, and evolving working practices have always created new and interesting ways for users cause problems. There is nothing new about the range and scope of threats changing with time but ‘defensive’ measures will also continue to develop  and most organisations will just about keep up as they have done in the past. But this is an area in which organisations need to become more proactive, and I do see security analytics starting to play more of a role in the mainstream during 2013.

OK, you can add up. Even the mathematics of an analyst can’t make ‘six’ equal ‘five’, at least not anywhere outside of a marketing department or PR company. That makes you and me officially ‘geeks’ for counting in the first place.

To finish here is a prediction I hope comes to pass, but one I fear may not happen quickly enough.

• Microsoft and the mainstream IT vendors will bring to market a range of tablets based around full function processors and ram rather than relying on low power cpus. Business users who travel and need to create content rather than just consume information need a thin device that can provide the same functionality as a traditional laptop. There are still many product / solution niches to be filled. As stated above, it’s a multiple device world.

What do you think?