[Gartner Digital Business] Top ten strategic tech trends for 2015

Ambler spoke of the top ten strategic technology trends for 2015. This was perhaps the most insightful session of the day, as there are just so many trends out there that it's easy to be overwhelmed. The challenge we have, Ambler explains, is understanding the extent to which each trend actually has the potential to change how we do business.

This is important as today's trends are fundamentally changing what it means to run a business, with everything incorporating digital.

It's all happening in the context of digital business. We need to be aware of the business process, business model, business moment and the transient opportunity therein - this lasts for a short time, while there's a specific need.

Ambler explained that most trends are uncertain in the extent to how disruptive they truly are, so they're excluded from his list, as are those that are already mainstream. It is growth trends that are the real hot topic, as they're the ones that will disrupt the industry in the next one to three years. Also, while many of the trends are not new, they have finally reached a tipping point that will accelerate their adoption into the mass market.

Trends 1, 2 and3: Merging real world and virtual world

In this category we have trends such as the Internet of Things, 3D printing and 'computing' everywhere.

Trends 4, 5 and 6: Intelligence everywhere

Linked to this is 'intelligence everywhere', which covers advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics, as well as context-rich systems and smart machines. These all leads us to...

Trends 7, 8, 9 and 10: The new IT reality

Here we find cloud/client computing, software-defined apps and infrastructure, web-scale IT and risk-based security and self-protection.

© George Ambler, Gartner's presentation titled: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015

Of these ten trends we need to focus on the end game: The user experience in a hyper-connected world, the design process becoming more emotional and consumer-driven, and the Internet of Things as an addition to the Internet of Everything, Internet of People and Internet of Places, which is where we use our smartphones to tag the people in our photos and check in to venues online. If you think of it this way, the sheer amount of data we deal with daily is overwhelming.

Smart companies are latching onto this problem and looking to offer solutions such as LifeLock, which can proactively predict that your credit card has been used in an unauthorized manner through big data rea-time analytics, breaking the paradigms of the past.

That's why we need to think about building contextual intelligence into everything. Another emerging trend is that of the contextual user experience, based on the user's location, a human request for action, as well as digital personal assistants acting as intermediaries.

All of this leads to the question of just how far we are from mainstream adoption of lots of technology. Ambler predicts the future is closer than we think, as we're likely to purchase our first robotic helpers in the next two decades. There's been a lift and shift of traditional IT into the virtual cloud environment, but it's not necessarily a case of having anything 're-architected'.

While the extent of change is significant, we've just dipped our toe in the water. The world is changing and all things are going digital. Be prepared, warns Ambler. Everything is programmable now, and we can't afford to wait.