When you think of 2020, what comes to mind? For some, “20/20” means perfect vision. For others, 2020 is a not-too-distant point in the future, just far enough to be somewhat fuzzy—or, depending on your point of view, completely obscure. Imagining the world of tomorrow means looking at the world of today, learning from the lessons of others, and being open to challenging new ideas. Let’s look at some of the world trends, technology trends and enterprise trends that will shape our world in 2020.
Most of us will live in cities.Cities and urban areas will be home to more than 60% of the world’s population by 2020c, up from about 50% in 2007d. This includes more than 70 cities with more than 5 million residents and more than 25 megacities with 10 million-plus residentse. Cities have their problems, including the potential for inadequate housing, congestion and pollution. But well-run cities have attributes that will improve living conditions and our planet over time. In particular, they hold the promise of lower carbon footprints per dweller and convenient physical access to services including education, healthcare and transportation. Also, the population density of cities makes access to high-bandwidth Internet more affordable to provide and consume, which in turn provides convenient digital access to goods, services and markets.Enterprise implicationsIncreasingly, high-bandwidth access to more than half of the world’s population provides numerous opportunities for enterprises:• Enterprises will engage and interact with customers (and citizens) in rich, expressive, multimedia experiences 24x7. Imagine consumers around the globe trying your latest athletic shoe in a digital 3D augmented-reality experience.• Enterprises will design rich virtual working environments to engage the best and brightest employees or contractors—wherever they reside.• At the same time, government agencies and businesses alike will need to bring design and technology solutions to improve housing and transportation systems, to solve traffic gridlock, to increase energy efficiency of buildings and to find ways of using mobile and other solutions to serve the 40% still in towns and rural areas. The use of sensors to manage traffic flow and lighting in cities has already started, but should be even more intelligent with the technologies emerging by 2020.Finally, we’ll work in virtual offices on virtual teams.The days of the grinding commute to the exurb campus or the prestigious downtown skyscraper are numbered. Concerns about fuel shortage and availability of land in megacities cause enterprises in 2020 to radically rethink their real-estate strategies. Ubiquitous cloud computing has removed the need for every business to have its own data center; bandwidth supports remote working; and the Millennial Generation is fully attuned to being productive and cooperative without constant physical interaction.As discussed in the technology section, the dynamic mosaics of specialists connected by collaboration tools become dominant in the enterprise. The ratio of full-time employees to contracted specialists will shift dramatically. Today we see IT departments of global corporations staffed by a mere dozen employees; what impact will we see on other business functions? Will we see the end of the monolithic corporation with hundreds of thousands of full-time employees?
Young and old, more people will live on and shape our planet.Between now and 2020, nearly 1 billion youth will reach adulthood (US Census). This next generation of parents, leaders, workers and educators will find themselves surrounded by more people. Older people, younger people, richer and poorer people.Many of these people will come of age in developing nations. But what will be different is that they will have grown up more aware of their world, connected through media and mobility to a global grid and a context to match. And with the exposure will come the desire for change—for access to more and better goods and services, education, opportunities and healthier, richer lives. Simultaneously, we’ll see the graying of the population in so-called developed countries. In total we’ll have nearly 7.6 billion people, including 23% more people over 75 years old, 30% more people over 80 years old and 58% more over 90 years old (US Census). These seniors will be more active and will work longer whether because of better health, financial need or personal passion. Enterprise implicationsThe digital youth entering the workforce will expect what today’s digital natives expect: intuitive, 24x7 mobile access to information and the use of social tools to improve their effectiveness.Active seniors will bring valuable experience to the workforce, provided we design flexible environments (virtual or mobile offices) and apply our ingenuity to delivering effective and efficient healthcare.To address the consumer preferences of the social media-savvy generation, enterprises will need to extract meaning from the massive amounts of text, video and audio content that exists. And targeting consumers, while negotiating their strong desire for privacy, will require smarter analytics and more computing power than ever before.
The middle class in developing countries will redefine markets.In parallel to population growth, we’ll see a marked shift in the balance of economic power. Western tastes and influences will no longer dominate the world consumer goods market, as the buying power of middle classes in China, India, Brazil and Russia booms. We should expect to see global tastes in fashion and entertainment more influenced by these newly dominant economies. The increasing connectedness of our 2020 world will have a major impact on the rate at which attitudes and tastes from one culture assimilate globally. “Likes” will promote Chinese pop artists, Indian fashion labels and Russian consumer goods at a rate unimagined to advertising executives from the previous century, buoyed by pride in local heroes, styles and products, and social networks combined with digital reach connecting millions. Enterprise implicationsAs more countries challenge the West’s economic power, enterprises everywhere must rapidly react, plug into and reach the newly dominant cultures in the world of 2020. Success will require a blend of hiring people who grew up in these growth economies as well as flexible and adaptable business processes that develop products, services and messages to meet local preferences, tastes and needs. Enterprises will require advanced analytics and flexible business processes (most likely comprised of cloud-based services) to adapt to rapidly emerging and varying market opportunities.
Resource scarcity will make us more resourceful.Necessity breeds invention. Scarcity of natural resources, from energy and water to precious metals to arable land, will be starting points for innovation. Population growth and the rise of the middle class is driving consumption around the globe. As our existing resources become scarcer and more expensive, we will find new ways to improve our lives and the health of our world, knowing that failure will lead to austerity or worse. We foresee our society innovating new means of energy production, creating more comfortable and energy-efficient housing options to support our ongoing migration to cities and eliminating shortages of educated workers by using the Internet to boost literacy rates and marketable skills.Enterprise implications:Enterprises will capitalize on new product and service opportunities in existing markets that are challenged by resource scarcity. Already, venture capitalists are betting billions of dollars on new energy concepts, and enterprises will apply new techniques to improve yields on everything from agricultural production to resource extraction.For internal improvement, enterprises will employ energy- and water-efficient strategies even as they grow compute, storage and network capacity to meet the growing demands of an increasingly digital populace and business environment. Increased use of cloud computing will provide flexibility with limited waste for spare capacity.
We will wrestle with our often conflicting needs for security, privacy and open access to information.As we share more of our personal data across social network sites, online retail, banking, utilities and municipal services in 2020, the threat of identity misuse and cyber crime will be ever present. Sensors we wear to monitor our health and that line the streets to control traffic as well as the mobile devices we carry will feed millions of updates to systems that can be used for good—or misused for ill.Businesses and governments will try to balance the demands of customers and citizens for constant access to information while maintaining appropriate security and privacy controls. But hackers, cyber criminals and cyber terrorists will continue to troll for new ways to target organizations with denial of service attacks and data theft. Regulators will try to protect the populace from cyber criminals, rogue traders and nefarious corporations. Executives will be held personally responsible for managing the tradeoffs between ensuring the welfare of their customers, employees and personal reputations, and leveraging the value of personal information.Enterprise ImplicationsBoards and enterprises that haven’t already done so will appoint C-level executives to manage security, privacy, risk and compliance.Commercial and government organizations will outsource sensitive IT processes to secure cloud providers that will employ former national intelligence specialists to continuously monitor and safeguard information at every level—from infrastructure through to software applications.We will find new ways to help customers, employees and citizens understand and make tradeoffs between access and security.
We will build our businesses on dynamic servicesBy 2020, many more business opportunities will be served by clusters of affiliated specialists—individual consultants or small businesses that join together to bring a product or service to market. Take, for example, the explosion of mobile apps in this decade—frequently they’re built not by large integrated companies, but by an entrepreneur who contracts out the design, animation, programming and back-end cloud services to various experts who coalesce to create and deliver the app. People will increasingly work as “free agents” or will form into clusters of small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs). In order to create products and deliver services, these dynamic mosaics of specialists will be linked by advanced collaboration tools. The business processes that IT delivers will likewise be mosaics—mosaics linked by process management and integration technology. CIOs will thus become innovators, designing business processes and orchestrating services (as well as architecting the reliability, security and cost/performance of these processes and services). Enterprise implicationsThe speed with which teams can be formed from pools of affiliated specialists will be a competitive advantage to the enterprise, as will be the degree to which groups are creative and productive. The enterprise thus needs to ensure it has excellent tools and processes to support such working methods. Service providers that offer cloud services to support SMBs will evolve. They will provide aggregation services allowing SMBs to simply “plug in and go,” creating fully functioning companies within a day. Cloud will become common, secure and reliable. This will allow IT to evolve from being a support function to becoming a key participant in business teams. Highly geared business process and application design tools, coupled with a rich array of cloud services, will allow IT to quickly create solutions that give the business competitive advantage. This will require a change of skills in the IT department, from people focused on operations, to people with skills at the intersection between business analyst and IT designer. We believe this is an exciting time for IT—the ability to inject competitive advantage into business teams will mean that IT is highly valued by the business.
We will re-imagine computationThe amount of data in the world is set to increase by 44 times from 2009 to 2020f. This is due to the growth in unstructured data and the widespread use of sensors to tell us “what’s going on out there.” Gathering all this data, analyzing it and then interacting with a world of mobile humans is not possible with today’s computing and network technology.By 2020, new computer/storage blocks will allow us to take in and process huge amounts of data in real time. And networks, especially mobile networks, will be faster and able to securely handle the 33-fold increase in traffic we will see from 2010 to 2020g.Enterprise implicationsOur development systems must evolve to program arrays of hundreds of thousands of processors optimally. Our existing IT management systems won’t scale to manage such environments. IT management in 2020 will be very good at flexing—adjusting to peak demands that could be 20, 50 or 100 times the normal run rate. These systems must also be self-healing. We see this technology evolving today with run-book automation; but to handle the systems of 2020, self-adjusting and self-healing must be programmed in during development, not bolted on after release.
“How can I help you?” This phrase sums up technology in 2020—systems that will work alongside us, helping us to maximize scarce resources, to process the deluge of sensor- and human-generated information and to gain insights to make progress rapidly. Looking at technologies that may be available by 2020, and considering how they’ll help us realize our fullest potential, is how we’ll solve the challenges of the next decade.We will have cognitive systems as human partnersAutonomous transportation systems will manage vehicle flow through a megacity of 20 million people. This will be made possible by combining a vast array of traffic sensors, advanced real-time analytics and the immense computing power required to perform cognitive decision making on the fly and at scale.Enterprise implicationsAs we increase our population densities, we must manage the systems that support us. We must know “what’s happening out there” in detail. And we must optimize our systems so that we don’t waste resources while striving to improve our quality of life (one without shortages and huge delays). We will see these cognitive systems used to manage utilities, emergency services and crime prevention. We’ll also see ultra-optimized supply chains where we know the position of every item in the chain.Cyber-physical systemsA pharmaceutical factory control system uses an array of sensors to minimize the water, energy and material used in its factory. The system minimizes waste produced by the factory and ensures adherence to all relevant eco-compliance levels.By 2020, we will all be acutely aware of the limits on our physical resources—water, energy, minerals and food. We will employ cyber-physical systems (systems built from and based on the synergy of physical and computational components) to better control our effect on the environment and our use of resources. We will use them in buildings, transportation and factories. They will reduce the waste of spoilage in food and pharmaceuticals.Enterprise implicationsMany products in 2020 will have a high cyber-physical content. We are already seeing this in cars—the start-stop and temperature-control systems in engines have increased energy efficiency. But construction, food production and pharmaceutical companies of the future must use these systems too. Cyber-physical systems will account for an increasing proportion of building, factory and vehicle costs as well as value.
Slide 11 - We believe HP’s approach is unique in the market:Confidence – that comes from knowing that your applications and information are secure, compliant and available where ever, whenever and however you need them. Insight – get answer and insight out of your your enterprise in ways you’ve only imagined were possible. Helping you to provide insights consistently, in real time, correlated between systems. It takes the manual work out of categorizing, rationalizing varieties of information and presents it in a way that’s current, accurate, actionable, even predictive. Finally, we coordinate the collection of data and recommendations / actions for automation in context, in order, identifying the causality among related events. Finally automated, inbuilt best-practices and compliance policies ensure that you’re able to respond to opportunity as it appears using the right technology for the task knowing that you won’t be hampered by closed solutions. Our unique engines are designed for the heterogeneous world of today's enterprise: You pick your OSYou pick your hypervisorYou pick your middleware/application server/development environmentYou pick your databases and applicationsYou pick the data feeds.And most importantly our modular approach is based on solutions that work out-of-the-box and can be rolled out and evolved over time to continuously match your particular needsThe only limit, is knowing what matters to you.
Enterprise 20/20 is a collaborative effort to imagine, discuss and debate the future of the enterprise.This six-month experiment—presented by HP and driven by the enterprise visionaries, industry leaders and technology experts who make up our community of customers—will result in a full-length, cloud-enabled book about what it will take for enterprises to succeed in 2020 and beyond. Together, we will examine trends, challenge assumptions and ultimately drill down to the very issues that matter most—to the boardroom, the applications team, the marketing department, the IT operations center and the CIO’s office.Here at HP Discover Las Vegas we are featuring a private alpha preview and taking sign ups to be notified when our private beta is available.