The State and Future of IT - Panel November 14, 2008

Speaking notes from
"The State and Future of IT - Panel Discussion" November 14, 2008 - Halifax Club

1. What will be the impact of Information Technology on business in the next five years?

IT will continue to be important to companies. It is still very relevant and one of the easiest ways to drive productivity. Many companies will be consolidating, merging, and acquiring over the next two years. The rationalization of the resulting business IT systems and ensuring maximum productivity will be key.

That being said, while the CIO, IT staff and partners attempt to get all of that right, we will see the return of the rogue IT systems of the mid nineties when work group networks and applications popped up everywhere as the main frame glass house was changing to client server.

This time it will not be PC hardware and unsupported desktop apps, it will be web based services and applications purchased\acquired underneath the radar by work groups and business units. Why ? They need to be competitive and will not wait for IT to deliver.
The gen Y's will fuel this kind of IT revolution

IT departments will have their hands full to ensure the security policy and overall integrity of this activity.

Mobilization of apps, access, data will further enable users and challenge IT

I believe that all of this anarchy will actually result in higher productivity for everyone except the IT staff. They will need to adapt, add value, and ultimately deliver an affordable supportable IT system.

2. What do businesses and the IT sector need to do in the near-term to capitalize on these opportunities?

From a professional services point of view, there will be a considerable opportunities in scoping, designing, implementing and supporting all of the IT related to company consolidation and M&A activity. This is a 1 to 3 year horizon

I believe that businesses in the IT sector need to balance the input and feedback from their classic customers ie: enterprises, CIO’s, IT departments with the reality of what is happening at the user/consumer/prosumer level.

I believe that if we only listen to the classic voices, then we will quickly become out of touch even extinct.

There will be opportunity in the professional services related to establishing sanity and integrity of the classic IT domain and that of the web 2.0 world.

3. What will the office of the future look like? What will tomorrow's business-person be able to do (say, in 5-10 years) that they can't do now?


The Office of the future is not an office.
Work will not be a place, it will be where ever you need to be. Home, at a customer site, at a project meeting, in a hotel, wherever you are.

Many of us will be independent contractors and or will be working with independent contractors


We will have a highly effective/efficient mobile device which will rival today’s portable computer

We will be increasingly mobile, and wireless


Like many of us do already today, the royal we will be looking for a compfortable, fast, free/inexpensive, and appropriately secure network from which we can work for 30 minutes of 3 or 4 hours, and then we will move on.

In the five year horizon, tomorrow's business person will be able to do what only early adaptors do today. Be highly productive, any place any time. This means of course that a business person in this horizon will find it very difficult to disconnect so as to concentrate on other important things ~ ie: life.

Finally we will live in a "paperless'ish office" mostly because when we are mobile we tend not to print ;)

Dan MacDonald