The key technology items on the agenda for 2007

What the experts say - predictions for 2007

Picture archiving (Pacs) and electronic prescriptions will be rolled out to the benefit of millions of patients. CSC, Fujitsu and BT will start to roll out patient administration systems in the NHS in England with the same success with which Pacs is now being deployed. Following the completion of the N3 network rollout for the NHS, voice over IP will be deployed.

Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT 

IT management will evolve to regard its role as the management of talent rather than technology. Service-oriented architecture will finally move from pilot to mainstream. Security will be viewed much more holistically, and expand to cover areas not traditionally included. And vendors may finally realise that there is more to be gained from strategic relationships with customers than a quarterly targets-driven hard sell.

Rorie Devine, chief technology officer, Betfair 

I hope that 2007 will be the year in which small businesses act on the need to protect their organisations through sensible business continuity (BC) planning. According to Institute of Directors research, BC is the top IT concern cited by 71 per cent of respondents. Sadly, the same research shows 11 per cent back up only once per week or less, and 51 per cent only back up on site.

Jim Norton, senior policy adviser, Institute of Directors 

It is said that an army marches on its stomach, well I believe a modern economy and a modern business runs on its IT. As an IT profession this is what we do, make things happen, we improve the way an economy and a business runs. In 2007 we will continue to see the drive to improve the IT profession. We should see our improving focus to drive down the environmental impact of IT, more thin client, more virtualisation, and more reuse of what we have. And let us continue to learn when we get things wrong but also celebrate our successes.

John Suffolk, government CIO 

The trends that will gather pace in 2007 are: standardisation and dramatic cost reduction on desktop, server and network infrastructure, building on technologies such as IP and virtualisation; delivering value to customers by combining an organisation’s unique values with other organisations’ technical and business components, using maturing technologies such as the internet, SOA and web 2.0; And there will be a growth of self-empowering professional leadership groups building common policies and alignment between them.

Andrew Stott, deputy government CIO 

Many people do not realise that viruses and spyware have not gone away, but have gone silent and infect by stealth. Systems now contain trapdoors and in 2007 we will see real losses from information theft increasing. On the people side, the importance of professional security certification will continue to grow – driven by the need for engineering levels of digital reliability.

Paul Dorey, chairman, Institute of Information Security Professionals 

In 2007 we will see green computing move from hype to reality in two respects. Firstly we will start to see power consumption being widely regarded as a differentiator. Secondly, as a user community we will start to assume the use of collaboration tools which will reduce the need for travel as the norm rather than the exception.

Ross Taylor, managing director, E.ON information systems UK

One of the hot topics for 2007 may be energy consumption. Recent research from Intel, HP and Capgemini showing that energy use by IT equipment accounts for one per cent of the western world’s energy demands is certainly a wake up call.

Moore’s Law states processor power doubles every two years and again, there's an associated power demand. Software implementers have learned to take this for granted and often develop software for as-yet-unavailable processing power. As we demand more up to the minute information, we continually implement more information delivering devices. If IT departments have to stabilise, let alone cut their power use, it will impact us in ways we've not yet begun to contemplate.

Sandra Smith, IS director, Toshiba UK