Forecasting for 2013

Happy New Year!!

The new year is a good time to practice prognostication, so here are a few thoughts on concepts, tools and topics that I believe will be important to the world of technology over the next year.

1) Enterprise Social Networking - Social Networking tools and concepts have matured quite a lot over the past couple of years.  The practice of social networking, however, is still heavily rooted within the consumer  side of technology.  While there are a few notable organizations that have adopted internal social networking tools, I believe that 2013 will be a watershed year for enterprises to grasp the power of using social network tools to enhance workplace productivity.  Get your business profile posted soon.

2) Windows 8 - Desktop operating systems are no longer hyped in the press as they once were, but the reality is that most organizations still rely on the desktop computer as the primary tool for getting work done. Microsoft has invested a ton of resources in trying to consolidate the next generation operating between desktop, tablet and smart phone devices, and Windows 8 is at the core of this effort.  No doubt that tablets and other mobile devices will continue to sell more and desktops will shrink, but in 2013 I still believe a large portion of high end workers will be experimenting with and adopting Windows 8 on their desktops.  I'm not, however, as confident that this desktop experimentation will carry over to Microsoft's mobile device operating systems.  I'm watching Microsoft this year as an indicator of broader shifts in the overall OS marketplace... or perhaps a better term would be Ecosystem.

3) Analytics - Data will soon (if it is not already) be considered a commodity.  Everyone will have it, but not everyone will be creative and pro-active in turning it into actionable information.  Using data may sound simple, but it is deceptively difficult.  There is a steep learning curve to filtering, massaging, and formatting data to make it useful.  Analytics tools will help this process along, but human skills will need to expand faster to keep up.

Twelve months is a good time frame for these types of trends to play out.  We'll come back in a year and see how deeply these concepts have changed the organizational and technology landscapes.