Gartner Identifies Tech Trends

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

The top healthcare industry tech trends were highlighted at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014 was the background as analysts presented their top ten strategic technology trends for 2015, according to a press release. "We have identified the top 10 technology trends that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes," said David Cearley, VP and Gartner Fellow. "This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the trends at the same rate, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years."

Gartner defined a strategic technology trend as having “the potential for significant impact on the organization in the next three years,” including “a high potential for disruption to the business, end users or IT, the need for a major investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.” These are technologies that affect an organizations long-term initiatives, programs, or blueprints.

According to Health Data Management, Gartner’s top 10 trends cover three themes: the commingling of the real and virtual worlds, the advent of intelligence everywhere, and the impact of the digital business shift as a result of technology. The trends are:

• An Expanded computing environment: Cearley explains, “Increasingly, it's the overall environment that will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased attention to user experience design.”
• The Internet of Things. Gartner states the combination of data streams and services created by digitizing everything creates four basic usage models: manage, monetize, operate, and extend. Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four models.
• 3D Printing: 3-D printing will reach a tipping point over the next three years as the market for relatively low-cost 3-D printing devices continues to grow.
• Advanced, Pervasive, and Invisible Analytics: "Every app now needs to be an analytic app," said Cearley. “Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.”
• Context-rich Systems: Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able to respond appropriately.
• Smart Machines: Gartner states that “the smart machine era will be the most disruptive era in the history of IT.”
• The Convergence of cloud and mobile computing: According to Gartner, the second-screen phenomenon will be the wave of future technology for enhanced performance.
• Software-defined Applications and Infrastructure: Basically, the demands of agile programming had created a shift from static to dynamic models of computing, including rules, models, and code that dynamically build and configure elements at all steps of the computing process.
• Web-Scale IT: This delivers the capabilities of large cloud services within an enterprise IT setting.
• Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection: Gartner asserts organizations need to begin applying more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools, using multi-faceted security-aware applications. Ultimately, “perimeters and firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.”