Time to innovate

By Staff Writer for Gartner

Johannesburg, 11 Apr 2008

Research house Gartner has identified what it calls seven "Grand Challenges" that it thinks will transform IT as we know it.

The company says many of the emerging technologies that will enter the market in 25 years` time are already known in some form today.

"Many of the innovations that will unfold during the next 25 years can be found today in research papers, patents, or are in a prototype in production," the company says. Gartner defines an "IT Grand Challenge" as a "fundamental issue to be overcome within the field of IT, whose resolutions will have broad and extremely beneficial economic, scientific or societal effects on all aspects of our lives".

The challenges are:

* Never having to manually recharge devices: Today, the ubiquity of portable computing and communications devices powered by battery means that many people would find it highly desirable to either have their batteries charged remotely or their devices powered by a remote source, bypassing the use of batteries altogether. Despite more than 100 years of research since the invention of the Tesla Coil in the late 19^th century, the most notable progress to date was achieved by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in July 2007 in its experiment to transfer non-radiative power. By this measure, any commercial application of wireless powering still seems a long way off.

* Parallel programming: Rather than simply creating faster single-core processors to perform tasks serially, another way to meet the constant demand for faster processor speed is to develop multiple, slower-speed processors that perform tasks serially. Simulations, modelling, entertainment and massive data mining would all benefit from advances in parallel computing. However, a challenge with parallel computing is to create applications that fully exploit a "multi-core" architecture by dividing a problem into smaller individual problems addressed by individual processors.

* Non-tactile, natural computing interface: The idea of interacting with computers without any mechanical interface has long been a desirable goal in computing. Some of the many challenges that remain in this area include the ability to detect gestures, developing a gesture dictionary and the need for real-time processing. Another set of challenges relates to natural language processing, which includes speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, machine translation and translating one natural language into another.

* Automated speech translation: Once the many hurdles of natural language processing are overcome to yield human-to-computer communications in one language, the complexity extends further when translation and output is required to a target language that is understandable to a human. Some rudimentary systems have already been created to accomplish basic speech translation, such as one-way and two-way translations.

* Persistent and reliable long-term storage: Current technologies are hard-pressed to perfectly preserve Francine Berman`s 2006 estimate of 161 exabytes (x10 to the 18th power) of digital information on digital media for more than 20 years. The barriers to long-term archiving (in excess of 100 years) that must be overcome include format, hardware, software, metadata, information retrieval, just to mention a few.

* Increase programmer productivity a hundredfold: As business and society`s demand for software development increases, and the apparent decline of students pursuing software engineering and computer science degrees intensifies, removing uncertainty from meeting future demands will have to be met by increasing the output, or productivity, per programmer.

* Identifying the financial consequences of IT investing: One of the most perplexing challenges faced by IT leaders has been to convey the business value of IT in terms readily understandable by business executives. As a discipline that conveys the business performance and results to internal executives and personnel only, management accounting could offer business advice and recommendations that would quantify the consequences of a particular IT deployment.

The company says industry leaders must be more active in researching and identifying emerging technologies that will bring about benefits not realised today. "IT leaders should always be looking ahead for the emerging technologies that will have a dramatic impact on their business, and information on many of these future innovations are already in some public domain," says Gartner vice-president Ken McGee.

He says today`s CIOs should identify which "Grand Challenge" will be most meaningful for their organisations bearing in mind emerging technologies, business and societal trends. "Then, within the next 12 months, review patents for additional IT Grand Challenge candidates."

McGee says companies should then identify preferred Web sites to monitor developing academic, government or corporate research on chosen Grand Challenges and take matters from there.

"There are technologies on the horizon that will completely transform your business," McGee says.