This final contribution aims to complement that by looking backwards to see what features of yesterday’s technology might shape our industry in the near future – and which aspects might need to be re-engineered into a whole new paradigm.
The earliest practical computers were power-hungry behemoths, often housed off-site in a dedicated, secure, and environmentally-controlled facility. Terminals were almost literally “dumb” – monochrome boxes fixed to the desk, constrained by physical wiring and with functionality limited to what their remote engineers and programmers decided to permit.
This began to change with the advent of personal computers in the mid ‘80s, which shifted the processing and at least some of the choice of features to the consumers. Soon everyone had their own PC on a “one-per-desk” basis, along with their fixed line phone and perhaps their own printer too. Then mobile phones arrived on the scene and their rapid evolution into smartphones, tablets and phablets, coupled with the advent and subsequent explosive growth of the internet, enabled the current paradigms of mobile and “always on” computing.
This brings us up to the present. Some of the specific developments in technology which are likely to have an increasing influence on how our sector does business in the relatively near future have already been discussed in previous articles e.g. DNA mapping, mobile payments, and even robo-advisers. (Hopefully that sort of artificial intelligence will not be a precursor to a real-world Skynet!)
However, having briefly embraced a distributed desktop model, there is now a quite definite trend back towards centralised computing. The value of our data is increasingly being recognised and turned to commercial advantage, and this is easier to do when the information is all in one place. Old concepts are becoming prevalent again, albeit rebadged, for example data warehousing and CRM (Salesforce.com, anyone?) along with slightly newer phrases like “Big Data” and virtualisation. The real buzzword at present is “The Cloud”, a generic term for a range of external hosting, storage, and data presentation concepts. Underpinning its hype, though, in a familiar echo of the mainframes of the ‘70s, we find vast server farms located offshore and cooled by the sea, supporting the likes of Amazon and Google.
It has doubtless not escaped your notice that the Cloud is not without its risks. Ask Sony, or Ashley Madison, or any celebrity naïve enough to post naked selfies to an online account. The Internet and social media can be both a blessing and a curse, for customers as well as for businesses.
Although data is becoming increasingly centralised again, there is one genie that definitely won’t go back in to its bottle: mobile computing. To continue to be successful most, if not all, industries will need to put access to their data and control of the methods of interaction with it into the hands of their actual customers, who increasingly expect to drive the engagement on their own terms, wherever they may be, and at whatever time. Not so long ago, no-one had heard the phrase 24×7, but now it’s a business necessity.
Sadly, this applies to us as well as to our customers. I’m very much afraid that the Blackberry – or its wearable, holographic, heads-up display equivalent – is likely to be coming to bed and on holiday with us well into the foreseeable future. It will take a social revolution rather than a technological one to reverse that trend.
