The days of the Next Big Thing could be over

The days of the Next Big Thing could be over
By Alan Cane

Published: December 9 2009 16:29 | Last updated: December 9 2009 16:29

The main difficulty in predicting the “next big thing” – apart from the ambitious nature of the task – lies in defining just what a “big thing” is.

Is it something that will have a lasting and material impact on society – the emergence of revolutionary inventions – the transistor, for example, or the integrated circuit and the microprocessor?

Or could it be software – the Cobol programming language that changed business data processing and continues to influence its progress?

For some, systems are their “big thing” – the advent of mobile phone networks in the 1980s, followed by the internet, and with it e-mail and the world wide web. Today, many believe “the cloud”, an abstraction that represents the electronically interconnected world, fits the bill.

But as Rob Gear, manager of PA Consulting’s innovation unit points out: “Some breakthroughs will transform life for certain people in certain geographies but that same breakthrough will have little or no relevance for others. A BlackBerry or iPhone might have transformed the life of your average urban office worker but it has had little or no bearing on the life of the tribesmen of the Masai Mara.”

Mr Gear’s colleague, David Elton, however, thinks that “big things” are less rare than is believed: “These are things that have changed the way we live and work: search engines, text messaging, wikis, bar codes, RFID (radio frequency identifiers), liquid crystal displays and cheap disk storage.”

He says “market moments” – the coming together of technology, price point and market demand – define big things, giving as an example online retailing: “The first time round in 2001-2003, it was a damp squib. The second go, from 2004, took off like a train. The difference: a market moment. People wanted it, the technology was there; they just needed secure online payment mechanisms.”

Some developments have universal significance. Kishore Swaminathan, chief scientist at Accenture’s technology laboratories, believes no single thing is the answer – it is more a phenomenon, or “scale”.

“The necessity that will drive all future inventions of significance is exponential growth,” he says. “We currently understand linear but not exponential growth. Successful companies, inventions and societies will be those that master scale. Three specific areas of necessity will drive invention – energy, health and mega-cities. Scale is not the same as big. The dinosaurs were big, the internet has scale.”

Rudy Puryear, head of Bain & Company’s global IT practice, argues that businesses are facing structural shifts that will “easily trump emerging technologies as the ‘next big thing’.”

He points to IT collapsing under its own weight: “In a recovery, the fact that IT can no longer respond within a reasonable time cycle will come to the fore. We are expecting to see a surge in IT projects that actually address complexity.”

He says that chief information officers must regain the right to take centralised decisions and that outsourcing will change from cost tactic to strategic weapon: “The smartest CIOs will find ways to use outsourcing providers to do more than cut costs.”

Industry experts such as Joerg Heistermann, chief executive of the Americas Region for the business process management software group IDS Scheer, doubts that 2010 will see breakthrough technologies, arguing that existing developments such as cloud computing may offer amazing possibilities.

“Real innovation is hard,” he says. “It means the destruction of what exists today and requires that we convince people to change . . . an IT industry devoid of supposed breakthroughs would still have plenty of work to do with our bread and butter – continuous improvement.

“Connecting customers and providers, optimising supply chains, streamlining accounting or making interfaces easier to use – these recurring projects are constantly needed to improve any company’s efficiency, customer satisfaction and profitability.”

A number of experts, including Colin Bannister, head of technical sales for Computer Associates UK, also argues that there will no single “next big thing” but instead, waves of disruptive technologies “which will ebb and flow”.

“The risks around them must be managed, complexity removed and company-wide management tools made available to CIOs, if these technologies are to provide added value for businesses within today’s rapid timeframes for payback,” he predicts.

As examples, he cites service-oriented architectures, virtualisation and cloud computing, pointing out that each can increase risk and complexity unless tightly managed.

Growing complexity also worries Karl Havers, head of Ernst & Young’s European technology team, who admits to simple personal requirements: “Let me use three devices instead of a dozen connecting me through the smart grid to my home, shopping, car and family.

“Let that happen far faster than currently and when I want it. Oh, and I would like to be able to rely on simple things like mobile networks to work and not drop calls and the voice quality on my landline to be as good as it used to be when using voice over internet protocol and a remote handset.”

Mr Havers concludes: “The next big idea will be about solving the confusion and plethora of alternatives for people, making things simple and reliable.”

For a contrary view, I spoke to Josh Bernoff, senior vice-president with the consultancy Forrester Research, who says that employees and customers are already taking technology into their own hands with dramatic consequences: “No matter what company you work for, your employees have better technology than you,” he says.

“With their iPhones, their Facebook connections and cheap computing power for rent, they can solve their own problems using technology. They’re building the solutions your company will run on right now, right under the noses of your IT department staff.

“We can tell you about the marketers at Black & Decker who let salespeople use little video cameras to gain an edge on the competition. Or the guy at the US State Department who built his own teleconferencing application to spread US ideas around the world. You can embrace their problem-solving power, or you can hide in a corner,” he challenges.

In fact, an intersection between unified communications (UC) and social networking is already developing, according to Neil Louw, CIO at Dimension Data Europe: “More businesses are realising the potential to harness the burgeoning ‘unified communications mindset’ of their employees – developed through the personal use of tools common to UC and social networking, such as instant messaging, webcams and groups – by introducing enterprise-ready equivalents as part of their UC strategy.”

Cloud computing, however, is high on many lists of likely barnstormers. Hub Vandervort, chief technology officer of Progress Software, believes adoption will be faster than most analysts think because of economics: “It’s a simple empirical model: in a 1,000-machine data centre, efficiency will typically be at 20 per cent to 30 per cent. Getting a further 10 per cent from your infrastructure by moving it to the cloud will save $6m a year – and many data centres are far larger than 1,000 machines,” he says.

Andrew McGrath, commercial director for the communications group ntl:Telewest Business agrees that the benefits and efficiencies of cloud computing and server virtualisation could prove too good to ignore.

“This, in turn, will make the network underpinning these IT initiatives even more important. As a result, the next big thing for business will be the adoption of Ethernet networks. Capable of transporting huge volumes of data at great speed, they are the key to success for the adoption of technologies that rely on shared services.”

And here is a wild card: IBM believes the hottest technology trend of 2010 will be advanced analytics – software capable of making sense of the mountains of raw data companies are routinely storing these days.

IBM argues that predictive analytics will emerge as an essential tool for competitive advantage, focusing on assets – information – that companies already possess.

But even the best predictive analytics are not enough to tell us unequivocally whether they can be the “next big thing”.

On ft.com Alan Cane says: necessity will sort “hot” tech­nologies from the cool, in his regular Perspectives column at:
ft.com/digitalbusiness

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