A guessing game

These are my prognostications for the trends that will devour the IT industry in 2002, I have failed miserably in the past with this stuff, but I see no reason to stop now. Some themes are pet issues with me, get used to it.

ERP: Put up or shut up!

2002 will see many companies fail to realise a single cent worth of benefit from millions of dollars spent on ERP systems. Some companies will be leveraging the advances made but they will be in the minority and finding that the advantages can only be realized in only a few select business areas. For those that are up to their necks in failing ERP systems, a critical juncture is to be reached; do they pour more scarce resources in, or do they dump the investment and try with newer technology to break out. We have had 4 very strange years, years in which the primary motivation of companies doing business has been obscured. In these harder economic times, the real truth emerges: companies have to sell product. To sell product they need support systems, these need to be capable of analyzing past data, and presenting the information needed to make the educated guesses that will define future corporate moves. These tools are promised by ERP, but few companies have been able to make them function, or function in a changing sales environment.

Trading in ERP is no easy matter. These systems have gutted companies of the ad-hoc databases, centralizing all the data repositories, now everything has to be done through these portals. Replacing this structure with a viable alternative will be hard. For companies that are not as far down the road to ERP, where departmental and divisional differences still remain, there are many more opportunities to break out and select solutions that will be smaller and more cost effective.

Cost will be something that, again, needs to be reviewed from the perspective of how it applies to the units that form a company rather than the whole monolithic corporation. This is needed to identify which parts of the organization are being a drag on performance. Smaller systems may be less cost effective in regards to implementation across an entire company, but may allow aspiring departments or divisions to sing and leap to new levels of productivity and achievement. ERP tends not to enable this type of progress, and companies at their wits end over ERP installations will be looking at it closely.

The Web reborn.

There will be a more serious, more mature rebirth of the web. B2B is an area that companies can profit from through either revenue generation through new channel solutions, or simply through cost cutting measures. New technologies coming to the fore in the web arena include Web Services. This is a maturing technology going the direction that companies favour; it's less a free- for-all and more a constructed environment; services can be plied; Money can be made.

C#: A new Language

Early in the year Microsoft will officially launch C#. This will be one of the first commercially available new computer languages in many years (Java is now about 6 years old, coming up on its 7 year lifetime!) This will have a dramatic effect on companies and how they go about developing applications. C# and the .NET framework will provide whole new ways of doing things. That is what these languages and libraries are meant to do. 2002 will probably not see much in the way of this break-through, but the seeds will definitely be planted.

Open Source: Much Ado About Nothing?

The Open Source movement has been trumpeting the benefits of the languages, tools and libraries provided, mostly gratis, for several years. I think 2002 much of the benefit of this will be seen, but at the same time with broadening acceptance will come the realisation that there is nothing really for free. The Open Source movement must make more of the benefits of the tools that they are simply free. They will have to look at the tools and express the benefits of certain items, probably to the detriment of others. The usefulness of the tools has to be promoted not the fact that you can check out the underlying code, after all most programmers never read the code they are maintaining, let alone the code their compiler is written in. It is a very select and vocal minority that read the Linux kernel code and make alterations to cure a problem they have. The action of promoting one tool over another could cause serious ructions within the community.

Java: It's death as slow as its execution!

It has taken a long time, but a great many of in the IT industry have climbed the long hard learning curve to get to grips with Java. You see EJB engines everywhere, Servlets being used, Swing (God forbid) being considered for GUI applications. The problem is it is still as fast as it was 4 years ago, which is to say it runs like molasses - it is SLOW. Many will say that the rise in processor speeds has mitigated this, eliminated the problem of slow execution, but fail to take into account that the application we now need to run as commensurately more complex and hence larger, which means they run more slowly. To really propel Java applications into the high performance end of the spectrum takes some serious hardware, which has never been cheap, compounded by the runtime environments appalling reliability this means that Java is an expensive tool set to build your business on. I think through 2002, especially brought on by so many people looking at EJB as THE panacea, we will see a growing move away from Java into other more performance oriented tools and environments, or into tools that cost measurably less to get the same job done and are more reliable (think Perl).

Wireless: new life to an old medium

2002 will mark a comeback year for wireless equipped devices. As companies try to think of new ways to enable the sales teams to sell, the concept of fingertip information will become pervasive. Palmtop and cell phone devices will be employed in growing numbers, alongside new sales support applications, to bring new meaning in the CRM world. These little devices have a lot of computing power, they are at the doorstep of being considered viable computing tools, much in the same way as the old IBM PC-XT opened the way for the PC to become a valuable business and world changing development.

The Economy Blues, and the post party hangover.

The IT part of the economy has been in the doldrums for the better part of 2 years, probably since march of 2000 when all the Y2K remediation spending ceased. The long slow death of thousands of Dot.com companies, probably caused by the general slow down in Corporate IT spending as much as the stock market blues, only compounded the problems. Now we have significant unemployment in the programming industry, much of which goes unnoticed because the people that have been laid-off often have H-1's and cannot enroll in unemployment programs (about 20% of the industry was on H-1B Visas before the crash). The extended nature of the down turn is going to have some odd consequences in 2002. I suspect that many technically oriented schools will down size their IT training programs, many people will get out of the industry and many people will be dissuaded from even thinking about coming into IT. As the economy comes back, the supposed pool of unemployed programmers that industry hopes is still there ready to dive into new products, will have evaporated away like pools of rain water in a desert. Obviously some will leave the other industries they have gone into, to return to the IT scene, but many will go on to long and prosperous careers as anything but techies. When companies go to hire new employees they are going to find themselves in a similar problem to that seen in 1998 and 1999: too many jobs chasing too few people. Even if the economy comes back slowly, in fact more so if the economy comes back slowly, we will find that the cost and pain of rebuilding IT departments is staggering. If the economy comes back fast and soon less people will have fled, therefore there will be more experienced people to hire back. A long, slow recovery will lead to more haemorrhaging of skills and consequently a more painful rebuild period, trying to recreate the lost skill pool.

2002 will be a trying time for the IT industry. The effects of the highly specific technical people layoffs may lead to a greater interest in industrial organizations, possibly Unions, probably something else, but these might start to grow late in the year as people get back to their feet and start to look over their shoulders at the people that were not affected, or at the people that caused so much of the hardship in the industry these last 12 months.

Conclusion

2002 promising to be one of the more interesting years in sometime. There are great technical developments afoot, and some big social issues to handle. The industry has grown a little since I started programming for a living in 1981, but under it all is a spirit of Can-Do that has always driven it, a spirit that wants and needs to learn to stay alive. Change is to the technical world, what Oxygen is to life in general, and 2002 will see a re-growth and rededication that will spell the way for the next several years.