JANUARY 2013: If you’re like most IT-savvy business pros, when Gartner predicts something big, you hop to attention. Gartner is considered the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company — it has 1,280 research analysts and 12,000 clients internationally, so it’s pretty good at making informed guesses about IT trends.
In this batch of predictions, a common thread is how IT departments are losing some level of control because of the number of activities and devices that they have to coordinate.
Here’s a summary of Gartner’s 11 predictions for IT organizations and IT users for 2013:
- In 2013 and through 2015, 90% of enterprises will bypass broad-scale deployment of Windows 8. Waiting for more stability is the name of the game.
- Chinese handset vendors will proliferate, and by the end of 2014, three of the top five mobile handset vendors will be Chinese.
- While “big data” will spur job growth globally, training won’t keep up. Two-thirds of the 4.4 million available big data jobs will go unfilled by 2015.
- Efforts to protect local jobs in Europe will reduce offshoring by 20%, a trend that will continue through 2016.
- By 2014, IT hiring in major Western markets will come mainly from companies with headquarters in Asia. These are the companies currently enjoying double-digit growth and expanding their footprints.
- Facebook will act as an information sieve, leaking as much as 40% of enterprise contact info through employees’ mobile collaboration apps by 2017.
- Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) will continue to put enterprises at risk as employee-owned devices will be compromised by malware at a rate more than double the rate of corporate-owned devices. This will continue through 2014.
- Through 2014, spending will increase by 25% on software for “smart operational technology,” like the sensors in vending machines and medical devices that transmit data via the Internet.
- Gamification — game thinking or game mechanics used in non-game contexts — will be used to increase employee engagement, with 40% of Global 1000 organizations using gamification by 2015.
- Wearable smart electronics in shoes, tattoos and accessories will emerge as a $10 billion industry by 2016.
- Up to 20% of the top 100 IT services providers will be displaced by market consolidation. This represents the restructuring of the nearly $1 trillion IT services market.
And here a few highlights from its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013:
- Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.
- The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content.
- Many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores, shifting IT’s role from that of a centralized planner to that of a market manager.
- Mobile will begin to mean more than the use of cellular handsets or tablets as cellular technology is embedded in devices like cars and pharmaceutical containers.
