Remember the Next Big Thing? About five years ago, there were lots of them. Whole industries seemed to exist solely to predict, promote, or provide the mythical Next Big Thing.
Analyst firms made millions from forecasting it; vendors spent millions trying to convince IT managers their product was one; too many companies wasted millions buying technologies that proved not to be the one.
Remember the three-letter acronyms? MRP, ERP, CRM and so on. Every Next Big Thing (or should that be NBT?) had to have a TLA to qualify.
But it has been a while since the IT industry came up with a technology that could genuinely fall into this category. These days, there are so many big things that nobody wants a next one. Voice over IP, wireless, broadband, grids and many others are well-proven, mature technologies yet to be exploited fully but which offer enormous potential.
Most IT decision-makers today are quite happy working out how to reap the benefits from such products, and vendors are equally happily trying to help them do so.
Gone are the days of buying the latest, greatest new product or version simply because it is there.
But just because the IT industry has stopped fighting to offer the Next Big Thing does not mean there are none emerging. A major shift has taken place, and many new innovations are coming from users.
Where is the tech buzz today? In consumer-created tools such as social media: blogs, wikis, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, etc. This is also where much venture capital cash is going.
The upsurge in ideas is increasingly coming from technology-friendly users who understand how IT can help to improve lives. And this trend will soon be repeated by IT-aware users in your organisation coming up with new ideas.
Forward-thinking IT directors are already taking a lead. Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, for example, is making use of blogs and wikis as a tool for business communication.
The bank believes that it may have the largest internal corporate wiki in the world – more than 3,000 pages, used by 30 per cent of its global workforce. Where a wiki is set up, the bank says email volume related to the project that it supports drops by up to 75 per cent.
That is a serious productivity improvement.
The Next Big Thing in your organisation may already be emerging – but it may not be coming from the IT team.
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