Bangalore, Aug. 22

Twenty years from now, email could be defunct. A combination of social networking and text messaging will replace electronic mails, according to Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect, Mr Paul Dougherty.

“The next generation does not use email. What was a cool tool for us may be replaced by newer, preferred forms of communication. Enterprises will also follow this trend,” he said, speaking on ‘Future of information technology: The power of the individual’ in the city on Wednesday.

From Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to mobility, blogging and Wikis, enterprises are riding the new wave of ‘business at the speed of 2.0’, using enterprise computing and Web 2.0 products like mashups. Key conclusions from a survey of 500 CIOs worldwide by the firm revealed that IT is not contributing as much to earnings growth as expected. Adoption, and not innovation, is now the issue for many CIOs. Equipment depreciates with age and technology with substitution, even as CIOs battle with increased expectation of agility, integration and standards from consumers. To counter this, firms are investing in new technologies.

Corporate blogging

Blogging, he predicted, would be the future integral communication and knowledge management tool. Corporate blogging has doubled to 8 per cent in the past year. Audio and video blogs will be used to reach a broader audience.

Wikis will also become mainstream collaboration tools in 50 per cent of enterprises by 2009, according to a Gartner Group prediction. Firms are already beginning to use Wiki sites internally for developers to collaborate. Intel’s Intelpedia and Accenture’s own delivery architecture group are examples. SOA is the fifth in the series of biggest IT trends ever, he said. The others being host centric mainframes, client-server and business process re-engineering, packaged software and the Web.

Taken from Business Line

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