Chapter 9. Future Trends

"I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997."

2001: A Space Odyssey

A number of computing initiatives currently underway provide a glimpse of some of the future trends for enterprise computing. Many of these are at the early adopter stage or are still in the realm of academic and scientific research and have yet to cross over into the mainstream business world. By studying some of these emerging and future trends, we can see how enterprise computing may evolve in the coming years. The technologies span the entire value chain of computing from core computing and networks, to devices and sensors, to new forms of user interfaces and human computer interaction.

On the core computing and networks side, initiatives such as grid computing and power line networking are starting to challenge how we think about the way in which computing power and resources are accessed and how they are delivered. Grid computing enables us to tap into computing resources upon demand, much like traditional utilities such as water, gas, telephone, and electricity. Power line networking is starting to blur the lines between electrical power delivery and information delivery. With network access available over standard electrical cabling in the home, consumers will be able to connect a myriad of devices and appliances into a readily available network with minimal setup required, if and when this technology takes off.

On the device side, there are changes underway that will allow multimedia interaction on cell phones, new devices for managing personal area networks via gateways that serve as single connection points to the wireless carrier networks, and new forms of battery power such as fuel cells that can last three to five times the length of traditional lithium-ion batteries. Sensors can help us to detect microlevel changes to environmental attributes such as temperature and pressure, or even chemical changes. This helps to connect the physical world and its characteristics to the digital world for an increased understanding of our environmental or business context.

On the user interfaces and human computer interaction side, there are many exciting developments under way. Artificial intelligence is applied for a variety of business productivity applications, including improved search capabilities, email filtering and prioritization, system troubleshooting, meeting facilitation, data mining, multimodal interfaces, and notification platforms. Multimodal interfaces can combine multiple interaction modes such as computer vision and speech recognition together with intelligent data analysis in order to help computers understand more about a business user's context and priorities. By observing user behavior, a computer can make determinations such as whether the person is in a meeting or is focused on solo activity at his or her personal computer. Speech recognition is used to improve the usability of handheld wireless devices with server-side voice recognition, streamed wirelessly from the device, being used to offload the processing requirements on the device itself. These types of behind-the-scenes intelligence engines are then applied in order to maximize the user's productivity in terms of automating tasks, prioritizing notifications and minimizing interruptions.

In effect, the computing industry is starting to give back some of the productivity that it took away from us in making us orient our work activities around computers in the first place. Computers have produced considerable automation in the business world, but they have also required us to orient our activities around them, especially over the past decade. Some of these future trends help to free us from these restraints by providing business information in more efficient and effective ways.