Changes in Technology in the Future

The biggest change we'll have to face in the future is the increasing focus on privacy and security. I think the second major focus will be on the pace at which business continues to change and the acceleration to find the new business value propositions. Third, we will tend to support more individual intrusion of technology. We will bring technology into our daily lives, and that intrusion will occur with increasing speed.

I think another impact that technology will have is that the ubiquitous nature of technology will continue to flourish, which will cause more stress and conflict between work and personal life. Most of us have no concept of what we're going to do with the speed at which we'll be able to find and do things. Our level of tolerance for things that aren't fast, accurate, and integrated is going to quickly diminish.

I think the next generation of individuals will come into the business world, look at what we've done, look at the current generation and say, "You've brought together the foundations of technology, but we actually understand how to use it and integrate it better in our lives than you did. After all, we've never known a world without Internet access. We're now going to change the directions of technology to be more reflective of new life-functioning ways."

This positioning by the next generation will become almost as unimaginable for us as we move into our elder days as our current technology revolution has been for our parents. The future we will receive from the next generation will bring with it all of the principles that we somehow created. Let's hope that we paid as much attention to thinking about people as CTOs as we paid to thinking about the technology.