There are a few technology developments and indicators which should be appearing on every IT manager’s radar which are likely to offer interesting challenges as they impact the way our users work over the next few years. These are not the usual technology suspects we might expect to find, which include virtualisation, web security, unified working, and infrastructure and cloud-based computing. These technologies are likely to require some real out-of-the-box thinking as well as some careful planning.

Wireless reading devices

In our business we are actively scanning documents into our ever-growing electronic library and one of the key areas we will need to address soon is making this information easier to access especially for remote workers. Once the technology offered by products such as Amazon's Kindle moves apace to allow us to specify our own document libraries, our business users will be able to get hold of business documentation at the touch of a button. Particular challenges facing IT departments are likely to be the storage and throughput requirements of the back-end system, the tagging, indexing and search facilities on offer and metric analysis to identify the key areas of documentation the business really needs on a regular basis.

Data de-duplication

Something I write about quite a lot, as we are seemingly heading towards data-duplication meltdown. Technology needs to be built-in to systems at a core level to ensure information appears once and once only. Shortcut linking is a first step along the way but more needs to be done in this area. Data de-duplication is going to be challenged by the need for synchronisation between offline and online working and with the advent of cloud-based computing offering more workers the ability to work remotely, the risk of data duplications increases at a worrying rate.

Information banking

Of course technologies such as cloud computing and de-duplication will help some of the way to offering new opportunities for protecting our business data assets but our critical information is our business currency. We need to be able to bank it somewhere in the knowledge it is safe and secure and accessible when we need it; this may include archival information or information stored for legal requirements. Information laying around on tapes, media, USB devices, and portable hard drives has been proven to be a risk time and time again – information banking could point the way forward.

Desktop dashboard

Making sense of business data and providing easily accessible key performance indicators is made much easier through desktop dashboards, such as those by Klipfolio which allow the provision of data in meaningful ways including techniques for data manipulation and visualisation. The information in a desktop dashboard can be made almost real-time and offer on-demand access to high-level information. We are already looking at ways of extracting information from our traditional ERP system into an XML file suitable for visualisation through a desktop dashboard.

Electronic tendering and trading

Electronic data interchange (EDI) has been around a long time but, in our business at least, there seems to be an increasing move to customers employing electronic tendering and trading systems. We often have to juggle access to a dozen or more different systems so expectations are for a common process to emerge and these independent and disparate systems mature.

What technology challenges do you expect to face over the next five years?