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HVTO Trends – This Is Not Your Average New Year’s Prediction Article

  

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By Scott Draeger, M-EDP, HP Exstream

As we start the New Year, we inevitably think about the future. We’re operating under our new 2012 budgets, kicking off new programs, and locking down our goals.  This is certainly good practice, as it helps us approach the year with better focus and direction for the next year. However, along longer timeframes, we are typically quite awful at predicting the future. If popular predictions from the past came true, I’d be writing this on a typewriter while refueling my personal jetpack.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency to make predictions that are too deeply rooted in today’s knowledge. In this HP Exstream article, we will explore the future of some key areas of the IT and technology landscapes that affect customer communication. We’re going to project the future five years out, but we’re going to it from 2007.

In 2007, there was a Blu-ray versus HD-DVD format war: Microsoft bet on HD-DVD while Sony bet on Blu-ray. It was finally legal to download movies after iTunes launched movie purchases. Myspace was the dominant social network, acquired by News Corporation for $580M in 2005. Twitter was a new fad for fringe geeks, hosting 20,000 tweets per day. Notebook computers almost outsold desktop PCs in 2006. And Blackberrys were the smartest phones on the market.

Predicting 2007’s 2012
In 2007, your five-year plan would have included some good predictions based on the information you had available. You could have easily predicted:

• Your recipients will prefer the electronic delivery of many types of communication.
• As mail volumes decrease, the sustainability of postal systems will be questionable.
• Colour print will become cheap enough to make white paper workflows common.
• You will create both electronic and print output from your applications.
• You will accurately forecast your storage requirements.

2012: Actual vs. Projected                         
Because you would have made linear extrapolations from 2007 when making those predictions for 2012, you would have unfortunately missed every major game changer, including the fact that:

• Smart phone app markets appeared and then delivered over 28 billion downloads within five years.
• A global financial crisis seriously damaged many of the world’s prominent economies.
• People trade privacy and location information for fun as social networks “gamify” usage.
• A billion Facebook and Twitter users are just seconds away from making a service complaint go viral.
• Tablets and smart phones outsell notebooks and desktops.

These events came from the hard work of people on the fringe in 2007. These were large gambles, and for each of these game changers, hundreds of start-ups failed. But there is no doubt: these things changed the world of customer communication.

Looking at 2017... Conservatively
When we start thinking about customer communication in 2017, we must plan what we can, knowing that some things are inevitable. Some easy predictions include:

• Computer power will be cheaper, smaller, and more mobile.
• Every paper-based business transaction will have a legal electronic equivalent.
• App evolution will drive new archiving and compliance needs.
• “Big Data” problems will appear and be mitigated by cloud systems.
• Adoption of new devices and services will drive new government regulations.

We can certainly plan for these things when we think about longer term projects, as they are pretty easy to expect based on available information. But these items aren’t nearly as fun as the game changers.

The Next Five Years of Disruption
There will inevitably be game changers and disruptions in the next five years. We can start by assuming that our methods of business and social interaction might not be the best. Then, we can look to the younger generation—who have not yet developed business methods—as they usually come up with better answers because they have more available technology.  With that in mind, these are some of the potential disruptive forces you might see in the next five years:

• Children’s first Internet experiences are via touch, so we must deliver touch or gesture navigation into every customer communication.
• Portable devices can do work anywhere, and at any time, so there could be backlash to the “always on” lifestyle as work constantly invades the home.
• The continued specialization of information into single-purpose applications creates “App overload,” which leads to new technology to manage the problem.
• The GFC allows exposure-free upstart banks to seriously challenge established banks.
• Consumers want to tune their communication experiences based on their unique personal preferences for information consumption.

Along the way, we can certainly predict that we will be surprised and amazed. In 2017, I might look back on this article and laugh at how unexciting these projections were. Then I’ll strap on my jetpack and fly myself home.

Scott Draeger, M-EDP, is the customer communication strategist at HP Exstream.