Top tech trends for 2014

“For many years IT has been mainly about managing infrastructure and operations, ” says Howard. “Now the pendulum is swinging back towards the ‘creation of the digita enterprise’, and managing (and monetising) data is the new key requirement.”Big data will get even bigger with the influx of new information from the ‘Internet of Things’, says […]

“For many years IT has been mainly about managing infrastructure and operations, ” says Howard. “Now the pendulum is swinging back towards the ‘creation of the digita enterprise’, and managing (and monetising) data is the new key requirement.”
Big data will get even bigger with the influx of new information from the ‘Internet of Things’, says Howard. “It’s not necessarily about your fridge being connected to the Internet, which has been hyped for over a decade now,” he says. “It’s about the critical mass of sensor networks that already exists, largely in industrial and commercial spaces like utilities, mines and refineries. We have machines communicating with each other, making low-level decisions on their own and feeding appropriate data back to humans to enrich our knowledge. We are also seeing devices and locations gaining ‘histories’ based on human social network engagement.”
For CIOs, this means building an entirely new talent pool. “We’re seeing the rise of roles like data scientist,” adds Howard. “There is increasing demand for people who know how to work effectively with large amounts of data. We’ve come a long way – thanks to technological advances like in-memory computing, there are new questions organisations can ask of their data that weren’t possible even five years ago.”