Technology foresight—The future for IT

Abstract

Technology foresight is critical to the development and survival of all organizations as technology continues to redefine and invent completely new industries over the coming decades. A technology foresight model is proposed with five strands. These strands take into consideration technology trends, market prediction, the route to market and the timing. The fifth is the identification of the organizations which will successfully tie the other four together. With an outline of the evolution of the IT industry, we better understand the technology drivers of the industry: semiconductors, storage devices, software, human computer interface devices and communications. We are currently going through a communications revolution which is being driven by political, commercial and technological developments. The new industry of multimedia typifies the combining of what have been discrete industries. We are witnessing the collision of desktop publishing, consumer electronics, broadcasting and entertainment industries. In the same way that IT and now communications are becoming integral parts of everything mechanical and electrical around us, multimedia will go on to consume ever more technological capability. It is proposed that the other communication-driven industry will be defined in terms of network concentric computing. This will displace the current concepts as a model that attempts more accurately to reflect the new continually evolving organizational processes and structures, changing boundaries and communications needs. This new model is built around the understanding of the process and communication flows of the organization. The Internet is already signalling many of the future trends in network concentric computing.