Technology trends: how serious is Cloud computing?

Undoubtedly one of the major things happening now in information technology space is the move to ‘Cloud computing’. If you haven’t heard of the term yet, Cloud Computing refers to the fact that your computer programs and data don’t necessarily have to be on your computer or laptop, but could be run by a company on a server somewhere far away (or better: on multiple servers at once, in an unidentified location).

Sounds weird? Chances are that you are using one form or another of Cloud computing already. Gmail, Hotmail or even Facebook, in effect these are ‘Cloud’-based applications, since you don’t run any of the software to use these services on your computer. The only thing you need is an access to Internet.

We’ve seen various attempts in this direction in the past –anyone remembers the ‘Application Service Providers’? So why should it become real now? Well, the benefits and the technological possibilities have evolved, obviously.

Cloud is serious business, so serious that the World Economic Forum has spent a couple of workshops on the matter. The results are gathered in the document: Advancing Cloud Computing: What To Do Now?

This report offers some compelling read. It starts with some key figures with regard of Cloud computing:

The report then goes in length over the benefits and the issues of Cloud computing. Let’s not forget the participants of the workshops were mainly providers and government agencies –no end customers, which is a bit strange. Anyhow, on the benefits side the report stresses the fact that Cloud computing could be key to accelerate innovation. It’s interesting that they put this benefit much higher on the list than, take, the cost savings for corporate IT divisions:

The issues (and bottlenecks for adoption of the Cloud) offer no surprise, although I must confess I was not so much aware of the geopolitical implications of Cloud computing (most Cloud providers will likely be coming from the US).

Question is: will the benefits ever outweigh the issues?

Will Western students move to universities in emerging countries ?

I’m trying to build an argument for the thought that the trend toward geographic mobility will increase with the upcoming Generation Y.

The most obvious argument is that young people will likely move to where the action is, read: where the economic growth is… In the future they even might have more favorable working conditions there –a better salary or more chances to get promoted. Some that have moved probably obtained higher salaries already.

But in the future young Western people might move to ‘developing’ countries for better education offerings as well. This is debatable, so I went looking for some hard facts. There are a couple of lists of top universities globally. Let’s take 3 of them and see how many are located in emerging markets:

(the numbers refer to the ranks on the lists, Hong Kong not included)

So in average about 5% of the top 200 universities are from ‘emerging’ countries (7% if you include Hong Kong). Not too bad, but it gets more interesting if you look at the ‘popularity’ of the universities. A list built by 4icu uses some algorithm to gauge the popularity of the internet websites of the universities globally. This list suddenly looks very different

(in order of first appearance in the list, excluding Hong Kong):

Surely this list is biased, since it’s partially based on number of visits to the websites of these universities.

Still the question is intriguing: could the list of best universities look like this ten year from now? And will these increasingly attract Western students, worsening the talent shortage in the West?

Generation Y @ work... less loyal, but that's the employers' fault?

I can't understand why McKinsey made the video interview beneath so short, but it's still a worthwhile introduction to a hot subject: how does Generation Y look at their professional environment? Are they less 'loyal' to their employers? What can employer do to retain young talent when it's so easy for them to look and find the next big opportunity?

If you have some datapoints on the subject please leave a note beneath...

(From McKinsey Quarterly:) Clay Shirky, author and professor of new media at New York University, has written at length about Twitter’s and Facebook’s influence on politics and economics, even before the social-media tools played a key role in the popular movements sweeping across the Middle East.
These technologies also shape behavior at the office, especially for younger employees who log into Facebook at work, e-mail from their BlackBerry on weekends, and consider their career paths pliable and open-ended.

In this interview, conducted at this year’s World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Shirky sits down with McKinsey’s director of publishing, Rik Kirkland, to explain the opportunities and constraints that net generation employees balance at work, as well as how managers can do a better job of understanding and retaining them.

(book review) "2030, Technology that will change the world" (Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer)

Despite of the catchy title this is a relatively down-to-earth account on how technology might resolve some of the challenges the world is facing in the next decade. The book is –I guess- intentionally kept simple and high level. For specialists in any of the matters that are treated in the book it will therefore look almost simplistic. It doesn’t help that many of the ideas expressed are based on interviews with a single expert in each of the field. On the other hand, this is probably contributing to the clarity of the view expressed.

But the beauty of the book lies in the breadth of topics covered. The authors investigate how technological evolutions apply on ‘usual suspects’-topics such as climate change, energy shortage and Health Care, to name just a few, but also on less obvious subjects such as pandemic risks, ageing population and peace.

An ambitious program… Perhaps too ambitious for a book of 260 pages. Unsurprisingly the authors stay somewhat vague on some of the subjects, and sometimes the link with technology is hard to find.

Nevertheless, it offers some surprising perspectives which at least should be common knowledge for everyone dealing with the future, with technology, or with innovation.

Some examples:

• Most of the water usage in the world is used in farming, especially in land irrigation. The scarcity of usable water is currently most acute in Africa, where water supply for basic human needs conflict with its use for irrigation purposes. However, there are times at which water for irrigation is most efficient, and these times depend on weather conditions. But these are hardly known in most parts of Africa, there are simply too few weather stations to report on local weather conditions.  Advising local farmers on the best time to use water for irrigation, is a major challenge because of this. The solution? Provide local farmer communication tools to report on weather conditions, so someone can advise them ‘on the spot’ on the most efficient periods for irrigation. Simple, clear, doable. 
• Another puzzling reasoning: air pollution is de facto slowing down global warming, because the sulphur it contains. Obviously, the answer to global warming is not to pollute more, but are there ways to develop some ‘clean pollution’ that might stop global warming? It doesn’t exist yet, but is it possible?
• The answer to some of the risks modern life brings along (pandemics for instance, but also air traffic) is, according to the authors, the decentralization of decision taking. Much like the Internet is self-healing since it doesn’t have a central decision power (but rather, connected nodes that can change according to the state of the network as a whole), other systems might benefit from a decentralized decision model. It is a thought that is worth much more thought than what the book provides. Perhaps a separate book altogether.

The book might have done with double the amount of pages, though it would've made it les enjoyable... The Return on Investment for the time spent on 260 pages is pretty high (hey, did I just find a new metric to judge the value of a book? ‘Return per Page Read’, or RPPR? Quickly trademark that one ;-)

Click to buy on Amazon.com:

Check out my previous book reviews:

• "What Technology wants" David Kelly
• "Crowdsourcing" Jeff Howe
• "The next big thing" William Higham
• "Future Files" Richard Watson
• "Future savvy" Adam Gordon
• "Futurewise" Patrick Dixon
• "Ecological intelligence" Daniel Goleman

Technology pioneers 2011 (WEF report)

The Technology Pioneers 2011 - Empowering People and Transforming Society report from the World Economic Forum offers some interesting read, since the technologies that innovators are working on today will shape our world tomorrow... Unsurprisingly, most companies in this year's list of 31 technology pioneers are about improving sustainability challenges, with a couple of noteworthy exceptions.

The most striking conclusion is that 18 companies out of the 31 listed have their origin in the United States. Europe, with 5 companies (2 from the UK, 2 from The Netherlands, 1 from Switzerland) looks a bit bleak in comparison (the WEF is based in Switzerland, so you can't blame this on US-centricity of the organization). Interesting as well: the first African company to appear on the list is from Nigeria.

The 2 'tech pioneers' that got most of my attention were:

• Novacem (UK), a company that not only found a way of reducing the CO2 emission of making cement, but they even make this cement absorbing CO2!
• ReputationDefender (US), a software company that helps to manage (and correct) our online profile, no doubt this type of tools will become increasingly important (and maybe this is a prelude for a trend towards asocial media?)

As said, interesting read...

Open source development of farming tools: a roadmap to sustainable farming?

If you thought that 'open source' development only applied to software operating systems like Linux, think again. Here's an example of how it could be applied on farming tools, for instance. The process is closely linked to crowdsourcing and open innovation, but I never saw an example of how small, sustainable farming could benefit from it. As Marcin says at the end of his brief speech: 'the implication of this development could be enormous'. I couldn't agree more...

From TED video: "Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000)."

49 megatrends on my watchlist

(discover the updated list of 60 megatrends here)

Those of you who don't visit this blog regularly might get puzzled about the variety of topics that are posted here... is there a common theme?

well, yes: this blog is about megatrends, and how they affect corporate and government's future. Hence the broad views and multiple topics treated here...

 I currently track 49 of these megatrends. There are probably many more, but for a good comprehension let me first explain on what basis I select megatrends:

• long-lasting: a megatrends should last at least 5 tot 10 years;
• amplifying: the trend should grow in importance (even if it's a decline of something);
• impact: a megatrend should cause a major shift;
• breadth: it should impact a substantial part of society or the world;
• (almost) inevitable: the trend is not prone to changes of mood or fashion.

An example for the sake of argument:

Below is a list of 49 megatrends I'm currently tracking. This list is far for complete, and some of them are subject to disagreement. But this is a living document, so feel free to give me your feedback, I'll post updates regularly.

The future of... shopping

Another good peak at the (near) future from ZDNet. With so many parties developing these applications -and so much at stake- no doubt the shopping experience soon will change quite a bit.

"What store has the new iPad in stock? Who has the best deal on platform beds? Where can I buy Lady Gaga's sunglasses? In the future, technology will put the answer to these questions at your fingertips. ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das explores the ultimate personal shoppers of tomorrow."

Augmented reality, the future of Education

I've been looking for useful applications for Augmented Reality in a previous post. Augmented reality might still feel like a gadget nowadays, but surely a lot of invaluable -even vital- applications will be developed in the future. Think of education, for instance, where learning might prove to be much more fun than we are used to:


Augmented Reality - The Future of Education from soryn on Vimeo.


This certainly add an extra dimension to learning...

Linking megatrends to corporate strategy execution

The major aim of this blog is to show how companies can take long-term, over-arching trends (megatrends) into account in their corporate strategy. While many companies do this already, they often take only these trends into consideration that have an obvious link with their business. My claim is that they should look at all megatrends, since one way or another they will affect their future prospects. (You can find a short overview of the why’s and how’s in the presentation at the top right of this page)

This process provides valuable input when determining a corporate strategy. But sometimes I’m being asked: ‘what about strategy execution?’. My response is that this is a completely different expertise. But I probably say this to mask my complete lack of knowledge on the subject.

Time to go through a good introductory book about Strategy Execution, which I found in Jeroen De Flander’s “Strategy Execution Heroes: Business Strategy Implementation and Strategic Management Demystified ”

I couldn’t have done much better I think. This book offers a no-nonsense, crystal clear overview of the processes behind strategy execution, and is loaded with tips and tricks to have the job done. For once, a business book that lives up to the expectations it creates through its cover summary!

But did it sharpen my views on how to use megatrends in strategy execution?

Yes, it did. The process explained in the book is visualized by the ‘8’ beneath. The megatrend exercise I propose fit very well in the three actions on the top of the 8:

• Compare and Learn: monitoring how competitors and sector peers adapt to and benefit from megatrends, will provide companies with greater insights to sharpen their own strategy;
• Update Strategy: megatrends need regular monitoring in order to assess their impact on the company (and its customers). Doing this will provide a company with invaluable input to update their strategy.
• Communicate and Cascade: this is an interesting one. If your strategy fits into megatrends –by responding to specific challenges linked to them, for instance- this offers a tremendous opportunity to build a strong story behind your strategic decisions. Due to the link with megatrends, the strategy will resonate much stronger with employees and other stakeholders. Siemens did a very good job at doing this, of you search for ‘Siemens’ and ‘megatrends’ on Youtube, you will find a corporate video explaining how each division within Siemens responds to a specific challenge created by a megatrends. It certainly offers a compelling message.

So yes, I definitely learned that my megatrend exercise does fit in corporate strategy execution as well. Another chapter to include in the book I’m writing about this topic…

(picture copied from Jeroen De Flander)

Click to buy on Amazon.com:

Are companies open for remote work?

I’m constantly looking for evidence on the changing nature of the corporate organization. We’re most likely heading towards a virtual company (using crowdsourcing for certain key tasks, or in the sense of ‘instant’ companies dismantling themselves as soon as the mission is accomplished), but this is likely a vision of 50 years or more. In the meantime, there will inevitably be steps towards the virtual company.

One of such step, quite an obvious one, is home or remote working. But how well is this incorporated now?

A recent study from Skype shows some interesting findings about this. But first, keep in mind that Skype obviously has a commercial interest in the subject.

For instance, the survey shows that:

• 62 percent of businesses reported having employees who work remotely either full time or part time;
• of these businesses, 34 percent of employees conduct work away from the office;
• these are spending about 40 percent of their time at either a client site, at home or in public spaces.

…unsurprisingly:

• the bigger a company, the more it is open to remote working
• it’s mostly very ‘overhead’ functions who benefit from this possibility.

The report can be accessed free after –free- registration, click here

Most interesting charts:

Ensuring the livability of urban cities

While doing some research on the book that I write, I stumbled on a book I had on my shelf for some years now. “e-topia”, from MIT Dean William Mitchell, is a study on how the digital network changes the requirements and possibilities of urban life. To be fair, the book was written in 2000, so it has aged somewhat, although it’s still worth the couple of pennies you can buy it for on Amazon’s alternative markets.
I’ve re-read the last chapter of the book with great interest, where Mitchell highlights the influences that will ensure the livability of the cities of the future:

• Dematerialization
• Demobilization
• Mass customization
• Intelligent operation
• Soft transformation

The first two were no surprise, although the first one became so ubiquitous nowadays that we hardly think about it anymore. We read newspapers on our smart phone or iPad, and hardly send any physical letter anymore. But dematerialization also means that stuff get smaller and lighter all the time (hence the concept of the ‘weightless economy’ –we now call it ‘cradle to cradle’).

Demobilization is a reality now, we replace many of our physical transport needs of ten years ago by video calls or social media. Not all, but a substantial part.

I was a bit surprised to see mass customization in the list. To me, this trend makes production more complex, resulting in more energy need and waste. But Mitchell rightly argues that due to mass customization less has to be produced. I guess we are both right: customizing your Nikes won’t diminish the amount that is produced, but customizing your newspaper (in order to get only the info you want) certainly would. In a way the trend towards ‘Cloud computing’ is also an example for this: we customize our computer with the applications we really need (taking them from the Cloud), hereby reducing the need for super-performing, large memory computers.

Intelligent operation is at the verge of happening, with the development of the Smart Grid for electricity and Smart water systems for water distribution. The Internet of Things will definitely make any form of consumption of natural resources smarter.

With soft transformation Mitchell refers to the way we treat older parts of our urban environment, which now doesn’t require much destruction in order to be uplifted. I’m not too sure about this one, although, for one thing, mobile technology and adoption certainly reduced the need to lay pipes in every street and building.
All in all an interesting (and very digestible) read…

(click to buy on Amazon)

(book review) "What Technology wants" -Kevin Kelly

If you’re in need of some metaphysical thoughts on what ‘technology’ exactly is, and where it will lead humanity to, this book is for you.

(Before you read any further: Kelly is using the fuzzy term ‘technium’ as the collection of all man-made technologies, tools and practices ever made or developed. The ‘technium’ hence includes things like agriculture or law for instance.)

In this book Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and a devoted ‘technology optimist’, develops an exhaustive amount of arguments to prove one point: the ‘technium’ is an organic, autonomous and purposeful entity that, if left uncontrolled, will ultimately be good for humanity.

Put in this way this comes close to a belief, rather than a scientific work. And, indeed, the many proofs of point Kevin uses are regularly mixed with convictions and opinions. This mixture sometimes result in awkward reasoning (such as the statement that the technium is essentially pro-life, since for every environmentally destructive innovation one could think of plenty of greener alternatives), or worse, in pompous statements (p270: ‘[…] technology’s inevitable forms coalesce around the dozen or so dynamics common to all exotropic systems, including life itself’).

Luckily, the book contains loads of interesting views as well.

In his efforts to compare the technium with a living organism such as a human being (hence determined by a combination of DNA, history and free will), Kevin concludes that the technium is now in its phase of adolescence, where it claims its independence from its creators. We, as parents of good will, need not fear this strife for autonomy (in much the same way we needn’t worry about our children sooner or later leading their own life), it is a natural process. “Technology is an ever-elaborate tool that we wield and continually update to improve our world; and it is an ever ripening superorganism, of which we are but a part that is following a direction beyond our own making”. Interesting view, which would imply that technologies humans are blocking, for privacy concerns for instance, should be left to develop freely, since sooner or later they will turn out to be beneficiary anyhow.

Another interesting thought comes with Kevin’s study of the Amish community’s use of technology. The Amish don’t reject the use of technology altogether, but they let other humans test them in order to make a choice for themselves of which technologies fit with their beliefs and values. Kelly concludes: “To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from”.
If from the start you take into consideration that Kelly is a die-hard, biased technology optimist, the book offers a compelling read.

My only fundamental remark is that Kelly views the technium as an external, separated entity –although it stems from humans. His line of thinking –as well as his conclusions- would have been completely different if he would see the technium as an implicit part of (human) life…




Read my previous book reviews:

• "Crowdsourcing" Jeff Howe
• "The next big thing" William Higham
• "Future Files" Richard Watson
• "Future savvy" Adam Gordon
• "Futurewise" Patrick Dixon
• "Ecological intelligence" Daniel Goleman

What would Internet 3.0 look like?

(From ZDNet) At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman reiterates remarks made at the recent South by Southwest conference about the future of the Web. Hoffman describes the history of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and then discusses his version of "Web 3.0," which he says will be centered around data entered in applications by virtually everyone who uses the Web.