Mid-Year Forecast

Check up on new office technology trends.

Even in this season of picnics and pool parties, it still pays to take stock of nearfuture tech trends

The end of the year sees pundits predicting emerging trends that will soon affect us. But it would be folly for a business to only consider the future once per annum. The world changes day to day. So, even in this season of picnics and pool parties, it still pays to take stock of nearfuture tech trends.

Web 2.0
It’s the second coming of the online world. New and improved, it’s Web 2.0. But Patrick Gray, author of the Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value Through Technology, says the web’s socalled 2.0 phase is not a panacea when it comes to design. Your online presence should be built around the customer, not the technology—something Gray says companies are forgetting in the fog of 2.0.

Business Intelligence Software
Businesses create an awful lot of data. In the past, the figures resided in musty ledgers; now, they’re digital. Data is the window to a business; the more data, the better the view. It’s not surprising that technology research firm IDC finds that employing business intelligence software to analyze data is becoming more widespread. A sign of the times, analytics giant SAS now offers solutions for small and mid-size businesses.

Open Source
We’ve been hearing about open source software for ages. Next year, will everything on our desktops be the product of a collaborative global network of computer programmers? Probably not. But open source will continue to affect the workplace—and not just because of cost. Instead, the move may be driven by control over the code, a lower barrier to use/evaluation or less vendor lock-in. Emblematic of the new offerings is SugarCRM; it’s been translated into 50 languages, boasts a technical collaboration agreement with Microsoft and has been downloaded more than a million times

Shortage of IT Workers
In this day and age, an office can’t run smoothly without an IT department. But a Robert Half Technology report points to a shortage of IT workers, finding that it takes 56 days to fill a full-time staff-level position within an IT department and 87 days to find a manager. Not only is it a challenge to find and keep an employee, but companies also have to be prepared in the likely event that no one will answer the help desk phone in an emergency. —Lee Gimpel