The impact levels of new and emerging macro trends are defined as emerging (likely to drive business needs in the future — keep watching), through maturing, to burning (you cannot afford to ignore — already driving new business needs).

In this section we will summarise the main technological macro trends involved on much of the socio-cultural and business trends today. Sustainability, collaboration, community building, social networking, localisation, and digitally connected societies are hot socio-cultural and economic macro trends that are supported by some new technological concepts, for example, Virtualisation, Context-aware Applications, Cloud Computing and new alternative delivery models, web social networks, advanced user interfaces, and Green IT.

The pace of change for technologies is rapid. The speed at which new inventions are coming to the market and being copied is increasing whilst product lifecycles are getting shorter. Technologies today are advancing at a far quicker pace than ever before. Consumers, particularly of Generation Y, are used to using more and more sophisticated technologies as part of their everyday lives. As change is happening faster, organisations need to be looking to harvest a larger crop of ideas to keep up. Open Innovation and crowdsourcing enables organisations to do this.

The advances being made in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are bringing about a revolution in the ways both that companies are doing business and that people interact or use such technologies as a worker or consumer. For the private and working environment, ICT and new Enabling Information Technologies (EIT), shown on the EIT radar, will be an unprecedented tool to support both the social graph which describes the relationships between individuals in a community, and the process agreed by the organisation to get the best efficiency for collaboration and decision making.

A key component of every organisation’s Corporate Governance framework is the system by which the present, and future, use of IT should be directed and controlled, or the Corporate Governance of Information Technology.

In practice, IT Governance framework is been impacted today by new forces on the two sides of framework, the first side corresponding to the business need for compliance, and the second one corresponding to the IT function serving that business and looking for performance.

The adoption of an IT infrastructure optimisation strategy looking for agility, cost reductions, and focusing on going green is a directive in data centres nowadays. Virtualisation (or physical consolidation) will allow for the reduction of horizontal growth. Logical consolidation will also allow the sharing of workloads between several virtual machines placed in different physical machines, whereas rationalisation will allow the identification of unnecessary or redundant applications that can be eliminated.

Moreover, extending Virtualisation to desktop environments will promote user mobilisation by achieving new computational models and protecting critical information at data centre levels. On the other hand, Virtualisation will be a technology enabler, providing the scalability and agility needed to service providers in emerging models, like Cloud Computing.

Evolution towards miniaturisation will be one of the other technological trends alongside Virtualisation 2.0 and Green IT. Green technology will help reduce energy usage and wastage, increasing recycling of redundant hardware as well as enabling collaboration to the extent that the need for travel, particularly via air-transport, is reduced.

Cloud Computing, despite being an evolving and not yet fully mature concept, will become a new alternative delivery and acquisition model for organisations. It will create considerable value in terms of scale, flexibility, time-to-market and speed, environmental efficiency, and costs. Cloud Computing can also be known as xaaS — everything as a service — and will be the seed for other emerging delivery models such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and Utility Computing, both aligning technology with business requirements. Non-critical applications and final consumer / mobility applications will be first supported by these business models.

In the near future, through interoperability and cross-platform solutions, Utility Computing models will package computing capabilities (such as process and storage) as a metered service, similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, telephone network). All these new models will involve less investment and a deep change to the boundaries between customers and suppliers.

One important effect of social networks and social media software, and the related social media software or collaborative Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 tools, is the capability to create, aggregate, update, and easily share knowledge between communities of persons. This focus can provide different ways of solving business problems in companies and it will be a way for evolving and linking Internet / Intranet / Extranet applications in the short term towards the broader concept of social computing (Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0). For example, a company could replace an employee FAQ for an internal forum, a chat, a blog or other web 2.0 tools, such as mashups.

Social computing is spreading through society, and technology innovation is delivered first to users and costumers in a consumer-to-business (C2B) model instead of business-to-consumer (B2C). Technology evolution, products and services definition is more led by the consumer market
than the corporate world. Customers and employees are becoming the source of information and inspiration for companies, giving name to the crowdsourcing trend.

Big web actors have massively adopted Identity Federation strategies, and most B2B exchanges should do the same and let power business users consume the data in mashups, and securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration. There is a convergence of identity concepts in the B2B, B2C, and public services areas.

The rise of Internet-based services (online banking, email, rentals, eBay, online travel booking, online gaming, distribution boards, etc.) has challenged the context-based identity model. Now Cloud Computing, collaboration tools, and social networks may end it.

Although the Semantic and Contextual Web, also referred to as Web 3.0 or Enterprise 3.0, is a few years off full realisation, niche applications such as Semantic Search Engines are available now at corporate level and the World Wide Web.

Open Source Software (OSS) promotes interoperability between many vendors, and allows free access to source that enables rapid tailoring and bug-fixing. Support can be obtained from a number of different sources, giving a wider choice for the user community.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being implemented by the leading market companies. These forms of architecture are characterised by the fact that they are composed of functional units (services) rendered by service businesses. SOA enables the development of Business Process Management (BPM) applications, supporting corporate processes as a defined composition of business activities, each of which is a service provided by SOA.

When processes, systems and resources are distributed over the network, increasingly organisations are considering REST (Representational State Transfer) as an alternative architectural style to SOA because of its simplicity, scalability, portability, and reliability. REST as an architectural style, support linking text, graphics, sound, video and other such media, using a global identifier. Components on the network communicate by exchanging representations of the resources, rather than the resources themselves. With REST, components on the network need to know very little about a resource in order to interact with it, other than its global identifier, and the action to request.

In the collaboration context, BPM will facilitate lean business processes that can be translated into executable business logic. A specific class of application in collaboration model will be Decision Support and which will enable business groups to take collective decisions.

Simplicity and efficiency at user level will have, as a counterpart, an increased complexity of the overall application landscape organised by business processes. Use of simulation tools will help both to anticipate possible problems and to facilitate user adoption of these business processes.

The benefits of collaboration, communication, and knowledge-sharing with people within and external to an organisation in a standardised and open way, and the benefits of using advanced analytics and Decision Support tools, including data mining, statistical software, and new technologies
for searching unstructured content (for example, speech analytics and audio / video mining on Contact Centre interactions) and other search enhancements, such as semantic analytics, will be a key differentiator in modern decision-making system.

Information agenda and information transparency are concepts for a holistic approach to the use of business information (structured and unstructured), disregarding specific operations or business processes. They maximise the value of the data, bringing together the best practices in data modelling and market analysis at competitive cost. Approaching through Enterprise Information Management / Enterprise Information Planning systems will impact the Business Intelligence area, as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) have impacted the applications area.

The amount of data collected by elements such as sensors and tracking systems, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and wearable devices, is growing and will continue to grow exponentially as our world turns into a world where computing power is within everything we use on a daily basis. With this rising flood of data, organisations and individuals need to find a means to filter out the wheat from the chaff so that they can focus on what is important. New tools will be needed to manage the masses of data.

We can mitigate this somewhat through data visualisation. This will enable us to present this often complex, multi-dimensional data in a visual format using dimensions such as colour, size, and shape. The aim is to portray information in a way that is easy to understand, so that users can focus on what is important to them.

New ways of interfacing with computers such as voice, 3D interfaces (immersive applications), touch, and thought will help to drive this evolution towards new ways of computing.

User Interface will gradually take advantage of multi-touch screens, augmented reality, motion capture feature and enhanced graphics using consumer electronics advances in infotainment and gaming.

Other Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies — for example, brain-computer interfaces, and emotion detection on voice / face — are being investigated in order to build innovative ways of interfacing using Interactive Virtual Assistants (IVA), avatars, or virtual cyber-characters.

The humanising trends and these new interfaces will be enhanced through other basic HCI technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques applied on speech and written text. HCI technologies are a key enabler to build future conversational interfaces for all kinds of applications and to enhance accessibility to web and mobile channels.

Technology will enable access to information from anywhere on any device as it becomes part of the furniture and can be defined as Ubiquitous Network Connectivity. Not only will technology become part of the furniture, but it will also become part of what we wear, extending the term to wearable computers. These systems will monitor our health, our location, and provide us with information on the go.

The wireless world will become a reality, enabling these embedded devices to talk. New mobile applications, devices, terminals, and interoperability standards will enable the development of wireless mobile computing and ubiquitous and pervasive computing, representing a world where every ‘thing’ has some computing capability and all things are all joined up over a vast network, and where information processing has been integrated into all kinds of activities, down to everyday activities such as driving one’s car.

This connected car is just the first of many things that we expect to see connected to the ‘Internet of things’ in the not too distant future. More ‘things’ will have computing power and connectivity, the means to compute and communicate, and they will be able to sense their own status and that of the environment around them, and when the Semantic Web gets here they will have a common understanding of the meaning of concepts.

The Future Internet will look like a virtual brain, with memory and intelligence. The web is becoming more intelligent, and is enabling us to communicate better within a boundless society. Using AI and Semantic Web technologies, advanced analytics capabilities and a memory based on our own experiences and Collective Intelligence, the web will be able to make decisions, provide simulations, predictions and recommendations that will enhance our own decision-making.

In the same way, Collective Intelligence and Collaborative Design are becoming widely accepted as the path to improved innovation and performance on processes, products and services. The benefits of communicating and knowledge-sharing with people within and external to an organisation in a standardised and open way will be a key differentiator in modern Companies 2.0.

Context-aware Computing, as the development of systems that integrate context information (Location + Presence + Identity + Activity + Device + Network + Content) to make services more convenient and easy to use, will rise from areas like mobile applications, eCommerce, social networking and logistics, to other applications —public and private —across many sectors, where collection, processing and presentation of contextually aware information, either to end devices or interfaces to other systems, will bring disruptive innovation. Context-aware autonomic objects will be able to generate automatic code and human-controlled behaviours. This will exploit peer-to-peer bio-inspired communication models.

With the convergence movement towards IP of the Telecom industry, telephony and voice communications has stopped being something you can only experience using a telephony device, be it a landline phone or a mobile. Indeed, software such as Skype allow calls to be made using a computer with a microphone and headset. Similar shifts affect the telecom services industry, as deployment of features such as voicemail, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) as black boxes in the network connected through dedicated interfaces comes to an end, and these features being developed and deployed as part of generic computer systems, connected via IP as an application or service provided by telecoms operators. Telecom service as applications and Communications as a Service (CaaS) lowers the barrier to enter this market and potentially new actors can tackle established telecom providers.

Next Generation Networks (NGNs) allows evolution from a vertical model of specific telecommunications services to a horizontal model with a unified IP network supporting of the whole range of multimedia services (real / no real time, streaming, multimedia services, voice, video), as well as the evolution and migration of the current telecommunication services.

In this sense, Unified Communications (UC) and converged (voice-data) communications enabled by IP will be mainstream in all businesses as a way of reducing communication costs and interconnecting multiple and different devices and business applications. Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) describes the addition of communications capabilities to collaboration technologies, generally from the perspective of collaboration practitioners.

UCC is a new concept less developed than UC, but with a high potential to impact organisations and transform businesses. Mashups, web APIs, conversational interfaces and IVAs, mobile portal, web services and packaged clients, will enable communications and collaboration services to be blended into a mix that includes RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, email, social networks, calendars, online communities, and discussion forums. These communication modalities will be accessed directly by consumers and will be provided tightly into applications where they will be used contextually.