Media and Consumer Tech Trend #3 - Information Acceleration

Recently the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years', and I have covered two of these trends Gartner called out here on the blog. The first one, the importance of understanding the customer profile as you create products and services, and perhaps more importantly, as you make decisions on hiring and promotion into leadership roles has definite implications for the design of enterprise technologies and programs. The second, the desire for simultaneously powerful, multi-functional, but simple and easy to use solutions that are prevalent in the consumer world, is increasing in relevance in the workplace as well.

Today I wanted to wrap up this series by taking a look at one more of Gartner's '10 trends', the one titled 'The Impact of Acceleration/Deceleration: The Temporal Digital Divide Widens'. What does this mean, and why is it significant? First, more details from Gartner on this trend:

Acceleration means consumers expect regular and increasingly frequent product upgrades. Over time, there has been a closing of the classic "digital divide" between the haves and have-nots in terms of access to basic technology products and services. However, new digital divides have opened up, especially inequalities in relation to the social graph and consumers' ability to access and manage — or not manage — real-time, nonstop ubiquitous connectivity that is the product of technological acceleration.

Interesting take no doubt, but as technology, particularly mobile technologies and more specifically mobile access to the internet particularly in the developing nations has the effect of levelling the playing field at least in terms of basic access, then the next source of advantage and opportunity shifts from providing basic technology and access, to providing ways to make sense of the flood of information that has become more widely available. On the consumer side think of it this way, most everyone is online, has access to more information than has ever been available at any time in history, and more than likely is building personal social networks that span local areas, states, and nations. The answer to just about any question can be found, the problem often is actually sorting the good from the bad from the ridiculous number of options.

At work, we see similar challenges, (and opportunities). As electronic communication and digital technologies have been introduced over the last two decades, most organizations no longer have a shortage of data and information, in fact, in some cases workplaces are drowning in too much information. The problem of collecting or at least digitizing information is less and less a problem, but making sense of it all, and turning or transforming all this raw information in its many forms, (email, voice, video, documents, IM, activity streams, external social network data, and more), into relevant, meaningful, accessible, and actionable insights is the next frontier for organizations and solution providers to master. More simply put, the next set and group of more interesting future developments in workplace technologies will be the ones that help to effectively address what Gartner aptly notes in their predictions, enabling people to quickly make sense of the massive flood of digital data that better and faster transaction processing systems, cheap data storage, and increasing mobile and virtual access to it all has made available.

What do you think? Where you work is your problem lack of information, or the ability to sort through all the information you have?

Comments

[Garrett O'Brien]

Some very good points Steve (as always!)....

What many overlook, especially Gartner in their assessments on this topic, is everything is generational and as long as most remember their history -- technology included -- then we can build upon what has already been tried...

There are some basics that remain, no matter what advancements take place - we will never be weightless on a rotating body, for example... There are principles, and there are laws in technology -- keeping ourselves educated about them all will go a long way in building the latest and greatest...

This creates the logarithmic acceleration of any technology -- and building upon what we already know, we will try new ways to accomplish what was said to be impossible... in other words, making the impossible, I'm possible...

We have a tendency of viewing things from our own history -- and many times forgetting that a vision of what it would be like to do something much differently could (and would) create a dream and aspiration that would motivate innovation.

Gartner is on the mark that the availability of information through more economical and more powerful means is making information a flood -- we are, after all, producing as much information in two days as it took all of mankind to create from the beginning of time to the year 2002... and 2002 was only 10 years ago!

Makes you think what the next 10 months will bring...