ICT Roadmap 2020 – Planning for the next Decade

Luis Praxmarer

At the annual Experton Group conference – Expertonale 2010 – recently held in Frankfurt the keynote was focused on the 2020 ICT roadmap. While a 10 years prediction sounds like a very difficult task many important decisions and plans need a longer view then just the fiscal year. Actually the lack of a roadmap often is the reason for “no decisions” because nobody asks the difficult questions about the future and therefore everybody focuses on the daily work and is busy enough with the annual planning which becomes very tactical focused. This can easily results in drifting off in important areas and losing leadership for the company. This is even more important for ICT suppliers as they are directly impacted by the major changes we will encounter in the next decade.

In order to look forward it is very often helpful to look back the last 5, 10, 20, 30 years in order to understand planning accuracy, major technology swings, and mega trends and why certain trends did not make it and other did. This knowledge helps to better predict the next decade and the major disruptive trends. The disruptive trends are the main ones to look for as they will change the game plan and will create new winners and losers.

In addition to the ICT trends we also have to understand the Mega Trends as those are the market makers. Those Mega Trends will create the multi-Billion Dollar markets of the future. The impact of globalization and new distribution of growth and markets are very much felt everywhere. Green & Renewable Energy as well as Healthcare and Aging will create lots of new opportunities. Aging leads to major shifts in workforces, immigration, and integration issues while the ubiquity in computing and mobility are driving many sub-markets and trends by itself.

The 10 Mega Trends – The Market Maker:

1. Globalization
2. BRIC Countries
3. Green & Renewable
4. Health, Aging, Integration
5. User Interface
6. Information Utility
7. Social Networking
8. Self-Service
9. Mobility
10. Individualization & Consumerization

The 10 ICT areas for the Roadmap 2020:

1. Computing Infrastructure: Server, Storage, OS
2. Communication Infrastructure
3. Client – End User Devices
4. Buy vs. Make / Sourcing
5. Application Development
6. Manageability
7. Penetration, Reach, Usage
8. Consumerization / Scale Effects
9. Human Being, Organization
10. The Black Swan

Each of those 10 areas will undergo a major transformation and all of them are interlinked as well. Understanding the roadmap helps to be prepared for the future and for some to shape the future. By 2015 Hosted Infrastructure starts to overtake own Datacenter and Datacenters disintegrate into the Cloud. Data Factories provide a 5-10 times better price / performance and 95% of the server based computing will be done externally by 2020. Over 80% of the companies will not run their computer infrastructure anymore themselves nor have an IT organization comparable with today’s. And by then Digital Natives have long taken over and most Digital Immigrants are retired.