Data in the Next Decade

There is a time for predictions or at least thinking more deeply about the future and often that time is at the beginning of a new year and especially a new decade. Technology News has come up with some predictions about the "tens" which contain the following:

"As we move through our lives, we'll leave more and more digital detritus. Some of it will resemble what we share online today. Some will be emitted quietly by devices, just as mobile phones can signal their location.
We'll also have access to more data about the world around us, dwarfing the real-time stock quotes, government statistics, scientific databases and other information stores available today.

In the next decade as conjured by Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, all that information will be available instantaneously, anywhere. He imagines spotting an acquaintance at a conference and having at his fingertips links to the person's most recent research, plus a reminder of her husband's name."

This is dead on in terms of existing trends and the logical course of events as we move forward into the next decade. Companies are moving to cloud computing. Computing capacity will grow exponentially because of this fact. The capacity for handling data, raw and otherwise, will also grow tremendously. New technologies for adding context to that data, such as XBRL, will come into their own. People will rely on selecting relevant data and running analytics against it rather than poring over prepared reports. The behavioural implications of this trend are most intriguing.

Analysts, investors and others will become accustomed to drawing upon the data they find most relevant to their decision making needs. Over time, they will develop customized analyses and simply refresh those analyses with fresh data when they need to review their decisions.

Over the next decade, the growth in the power of information systems will be remarkable, but the behavioural changes prompted by that growth will be even more so. Check out the predictions by Technology Newsworld.