Predicting the Future

In order to provide context for IET's 2010 strategic planning process, this document presents views of future trends in information technology, particularly as those trends relate to higher education.  It includes summaries of work done elsewhere (EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium), plus some personal crystal ball gazing at technology.  

The Horizon Report, 2010 Edition

As stated in the report, "The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media ConsortiumÃ?¢âÂ?‰Â?¢s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years."  In particular, the 2010 edition of The Horizon Report identifies four key trends that are currently affecting the practice of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
• The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

four critical challenges:

• The role of the academy and the way we prepare students for their future lives is changing.
• New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.

and six technologies to watch, grouped by three time horizons:

• One year
  • Mobile computing
  • Open content
• Two to three years
  • Electronic books
  • Simple augmented reality
• Four to five years
  • Gesture-based computing
  • Visual data analysis

Update for the 2011 Horizon Report

The 2011 Horizon Report updates the technologies to watch:

• Time to adoption: One Year or Less** Electronic Books
  • Mobiles
• Two to Three Years** Augmented Reality
  • Game-based Learning
• Four to Five Years
  • Gesture-based Computing
  • Learning Analytics

EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CCI) Working Group

The mission of the [Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CCI) Working Group|http://www.educause.edu/CCI] is to help educational institutions develop institutional strategies and plan their resource deployment in this emerging and evolving technological landscape and to help their users harness and optimize the power and capabilities of these new integrated IT tools and systems for educational and research applications in higher education. In February of 2009, the CCI Working Group authored Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities: Challenges and Strategies in partnership with the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC).  The report identified four areas where focused effort could have major positive impacts:

• Harnessing campus and national resources
• Information life-cycle: accessibility, usability, and sustainability
• Identity management, authentication, and authorization
• Human resources and broader impact

EDUCAUSE Core Data Service

The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service does not, in itself, provide trends or forecasting, but it does provide extensive data that can be used to compare UC Davis with other insittutions.

Crystal Ball Gazing

The following are personal observations of the IT Architect and are intended to provoke creative thinking about the future of information technology and do not lay any claim to any form of truth.

Information technology can be viewed as a layered collection of services with lower layers acting as infrastructure for higher layers, and the top layer acting as a support infrastructure for the institution.  The following graphic illustrates this:

I have structured the following observations by the layers in this diagram:

• Applications
  • Because of the increased awareness of organizational efficiency issues, we will get better at aligning applications' functionality with business needs, although sometimes this will be achieved by readjusting organizational expectations to match application functionality.
  • The proportion of open source and community source software will increase, because it will provide functionality that it a better match for University needs.
• Middleware
  • The use of middleware will increase, because it will provide
    • Common implementation of business standards (e.g., alignment of University delegation of authority and permission management in applications)
    • Common interfaces for interactions among application systems (e.g., work flow, service bus)
    • Common interfaces for end-users (e.g., portal)
  • The integration of common middleware will move slowly, as many applications are difficult to adapt to different middleware stacks
• Digital Assets
  • Historically, digital assets have generally been tied to specific applications.  Important assets, however, will move out of these silos, either through the use of middleware to bridge between application silos, or by grouping types of assets into application-neutral repositories.
  • The importance of retention and preservation is increasing rapidly, particularly for research data.
• Network Infrastructure
  • (Note that, in this model, network-attached devices are considered part of the network infrastructure.)
  • Network
    • Network capacity will continue to increase.  Transmission speeds will also increase but not as rapidly, and they will peak, as technological limits are being approached.
    • "Wired" (copper or fiber) network capacity will continue to be orders of magnitude greater than wireless capacity.
  • Servers
    • Historically, servers have been associated with applications, not really part of the infrastructure.  The advent of virtualization and cloud-based Infrastructure As A Service (both private and public) is changing this, allowing for the creation of generic pools of servers.
    • Operating system platforms will continue to be configured / tuned for the applications they support.
  • Access Devices
    • Access devices (desktops, laptops, pads, smart phones, etc.) are becoming very generic.  The vast majority of UCD's applications can be used by any access device.
    • The need for mobile access will increase greatly.
    • The TCO of mobile devices will continue to be significantly less than for desktop and laptop devices.
    • The need for desktop and laptop devices can be reduced through careful standardization of applications' user interfaces.
• Physical infrastructure
  • The need for equipment racks, power, and air conditioning will continue to increase, primarily driven by research needs.
  • The need for additional conduit space will not increase significantly, except to support new construction.