What’s the Hottest New Tech Trend? Ranking Hot New Tech Trends

by Steve O'Keefe on October 28, 2010

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, has a new mission. No, I don’t mean we’re going to Mars, although that certainly is on NASA’s radar. Rather, NASA seeks to become the information technology (IT) leader for the U.S. government.

This new mission was revealed by NASA’s chief administrator Charles F. Bolden last month, when he opened NASA’s first Information Technology Summit. Among the luminaries making presentations at the summit were:

• James Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer, Dell Services
• Mark Bregman, Chief Technology Officer, Symantec
• David W. Cearley, Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Research, Gartner, Inc.
• Vint Cerf, Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
• Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer, United States of America

NASA has kindly made the videos of these hour-long presentations freely available online. Anyone interested in IT trends is encouraged to review them. Of keen interest to Minitrends Adventurers is James Stikeleather’s take on the future of IT. Internet immortal, Alexander Wolfe, the editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com famous for reporting on the Pentium “floating point” bug, recently spoke with Stikeleather and came away with this interesting perspective:

[…C]ompanies are attempting to codify the processes through which innovation can be nurtured. More important than ideas, which quite frankly are cheap, is the ability to pick which concepts are worthy of the heavy investment of time, money, and corporate mindshare required to take them to productization.

Leading the pack here is Dell. At the InformationWeek 500 Conference, I spoke with Chief Innovation Officer James Stikeleather, who is working to establish and spread a methodology for innovation throughout the computer powerhouse.

This desire to handicap ideas based on the ability to bring them profitably to market is at the core of MINITRENDS, the new book by John and Carrie Vanston. The authors lay out a systematic process for evaluating ideas in order to uncover those with a development time frame of two to five years.

Wolfe made his remarks in a column a few days ago on The Top 5 Tech Trends in 2011. Along with the need to grade ideas based on their short-term feasibility, Wolfe sees these as the big IT issues in the coming year:

• Data Visualization, to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information businesses are collecting and have stored up.
• Rebellion Against Maintenance Fees, by businesses that are tired of paying ransom to software companies for maintenance contracts they barely use.
• Enterprise 2.0, the integration of social networking into business enterprises, which Wolfe sees as a mixed bag but a major issue in the coming year.
• The Internet Is Making Us Stupid, by reducing attention spans to the point where reading Wolfe’s column feels like reading War and Peace.

Wolfe’s top tech list is quite a bit different from the other year-end lists we’ve been covering here on the Minitrends Blog. While most forecasters are focused on cloud computing and mobile technology, Wolfe’s list has a decidedly human element to it. He sees most trends coming not from a lust for the new, but from a need to fix a pressing problem. The Vanstons also cite alleviating pain, rather than pursuing pleasure, as a major driving force behind new technology.

As we continue our year-end look at tech trends, we’re anxious to hear your top picks. Will the hot trends for the new year propel us into a new world or shield us from it? We welcome your comments.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: NASA Information Technology Summit Videos, NASA, 08/10
Source: “Top 5 Tech Trends For 2011,” InformationWeek.com, 10/23/10
Image by http2007, used under Creative Commons license.

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