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Crystal Ball Time
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The Cutter Consortium has put out its annual call for its consultants to forecast key trends in IT in 2016. We usually contribute a few points to this collection, but we're interested in hearing from our readers. Do you have your own predictions about what will happen next year? Will data residency issues hurt the deployment of global cloud services? What new commerce models will be enabled by the SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) convergence? What Internet of Things (IoT) advances will become mainstream and affect our lives -- and will it be positively or negatively? Let us know what you think.
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Lost in Translation -- the Sequel?
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Tokyo's Narita airport is testing a megaphone, made by Panasonic, that repeats an announcement dictated in Japanese in English, Chinese and Korean. This can be especially critical in emergency situations, and could be applied in many environments where instructions need to be given to a multilingual crowd. The article says that "its translation ability is roughly equal to that of a smartphone app, so its ability to handle airport-specific terminology is uncertain."
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New Seminars
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The last few weeks have been very busy (which is in part why this issue of the KIT is coming out two days late, something that's been exceedingly rare in its history). Three new seminars were built and presented (or, in the last case, is being taught right now). Please contact us if your organization might benefit from them:
- "Marketing IT: a Strategic Dialog with Clients of IT Products and Services" targets IT providers do not yet have a marketing program for their offerings, and are not supported by a corporate marketing department. The lecture and Q&A take two hours.
- "IT Marketing: a Strategic Dialog between IT and the Business" uses about 50% of the same content, but it addresses the need for the CIO to engage IT's internal clients, using the same marketing strategies that an external supplier uses, in order to restore communication, alignment and trust between IT and the business. First presented as a full-day interactive workshop, this can also be delivered as an extended lecture of 2 to 3 hours with Q&A.
- "Essential IT Strategies for the non-IT Specialist -- an Executive Briefing" is a modular seminar that covers 24 subjects, ranging from strategic planning to end-user computing to managing an IT innovation program. When delivered in its entirety, the program takes three days. Custom versions can be built by picking and choosing modules according to the needs and prior knowledge of the client.
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Fog Computing
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In case you haven't seen this yet, Cisco has created the term "fog computing" for a computing architecture, particularly related to Internet of Things (IoT), in which computing and storage are widely distributed to the "edges" of a network, while communicating with central resources in a traditional data center or in the cloud. An application of the fog computing concept is to discard data captured by a sensor that's within the normal range, and only send abnormal data points to a supervisory system, thus saving bandwidth and central computing and storage resources.
Whether "fog computing" will stay is unknown yet. The words make a nice reference to cloud computing, but Cisco's "Internet of Everything" (IoE) has filed to challenge the well-know IoT term.
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Seen Recently...
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"By 2018, at least 50% of IT spending will be cloud-based."
-- IDC Tech Predictions for 2016 (paradoxically)
"You don't need a startup ecosystem. You need customers."
-- Elon Musk, inventor and businessman, best known as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX
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