Technology Trends For 2001 Call For Experience

The first working week has been ushered in. It is most likely that the IT priorities of 2000 will continue to dominate 2001. However, the economic environment for the project implementation has undergone a sea change. Every project in your company's priority list in the last two years has been at the top. With the new IT driven business acumen up their sleeves, competition has acquired new dimensions.

The fund managers have adopted a more cautious approach to these projects in view of the fast changing economic scenario. The thrust is being given to those projects that come up with concrete results within a shorter time span. Following technologies are most likely to dominate the priority list in 2001

1. CRM (customer relationship management): Emphasis will be given to the generation of more revenue per customer. CRM may be used as a yardstick to measure corporate value by fund managers and economic observers.

2. Supply-chain automation: Automating the supply chain will result in cutting down the cost of production. Hence this will receive top most priority.

3. Knowledge management: To retain and use/access the knowledge generated over the years proper knowledge management is required. Intellectual property is the core asset of any company. Storing information today is more of an organic process. Knowledge management along with e-learning will be a high priority area this year.

4. Content management: Guaging the knowledge bank of a company is importanct. Equally important is the need to apply the available information at the right place at the right time. Recently evolved technologies such as XML, will come out as the dominant data format in corporate computing.

5. Peer-to-peer networking: This idea has finally come of age. Opting for a change can reduce overhead costs in IT. There may be an inclination towards direct contact between users themselves.

6. Business process integration: If B2B e-commerce has to become the prominent model for business, integration of enterprise application should be given more emphasis. Since application integration is a laborious process, new tools would do a world of good in this area.

7. Mobile commerce: With improved methods and advanced technologies, the horizons of B2C has also changed. Now that mobile phones, handhelds and pagers have arrived, a re-incarnation of business-to-consumer e-commerce models may just happen.

8. Optical computing: Richer content sites can be accessed properly only with wider bandwidth networking. Networking of internet with optical cables will meet this requirement. Lower cost of this technology will make it viable.

9. Application utilities: With increasing cost, IT organisations will turn to data hosting centres and application service providers to cater to customers, distributors and suppliers across the net. This will also enable them to have a significant on-line presence.

10. Application frameworks: The n-tier models with multiple servers will replace the existing three-tier application development models. Even though in the evolution stage, application frame works this year will receive more clarity.

A cautious application of principles evolved in the dot-com phenomenon is all that is needed in 2001. Strangely what will matter ultimately is your expertise and not the quantity of work done.