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	Introducing the Workflow Institute Workflow Institute Debuts Technology Trends for 2004

Workflow Institute Debuts

Sam Adkins and Jay Cross have founded the Workflow Institute to promote the understanding and use of real-time enterprise-level learning in industry and government worldwide. The Workflow Institute serves decision-makers at the intersection of business results, enterprise systems, and human performance -- both vendors and the enterprises they serve. Members of the Institute receive research reports as well as instant interpretations of late-breaking events. They have access to a "Vault" of research papers, graphics, presentations, and articles. Charter memberships, available through January 31, 2004, are $750. Read on... »

Technology Trends for 2004

Top Ten Trends for 2004 It's All About Productivity Now. Dramatic Productivity Gains from New Technology Dominate the Landscape. By Sam S. Adkins, Senior Director of Technology Analysis, Workflow Institute Customarily, the Workflow Institute distributes reports and updates only to members. This one's on us, to celebrate our debut. The second wave of XML and Web Services begins. 2004 will define XML and Web Services. Companies that have Web Services strategies now are well positioned to tap into the second wave. The first wave was dominated by integration. The second wave will be dominated by productivity gains achieved by using Web Services to automate tasks, save time and increase output with fewer resources. Medium-sized and small businesses will be able to afford the new services previously available only to enterprise companies. This will allow the smaller businesses to reap productivity benefits without buying enterprise technology. Profits for vendors selling business services based on Web Services will mushroom. Web Services-enabled applications cut integration, automation and maintenance costs dramatically. Office 2003 picks up traction, spreading XML everywhere. The conversation becomes less about operating systems, languages, platforms, and applications, and becomes dominated by the concept of business services. The last few critical standards, such as security and transactions, get hammered out by the standards bodies. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) will be the buzzword de jour. Enterprise Application Integration accelerates. EAI absorbs several distinct product categories. Knowledge Management gets completely absorbed as a technology by Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Integration Management technology. Similar to the way personalization was absorbed in less than two years by portal technologies, knowledge management will cease to be a stand-alone category and instead become just one of many features in new ECM products. KM will survive, not as a technology, but as a range of business practices such as Communities of Practice. Productivity gains from new mobile technology explode. Primarily in the healthcare and field service industries, the productivity gains using mobile technology will be dramatic. The initial productivity gains from initial deployments in 2003 have been impressive and have sparked a brush fire of adoption as customers adopt the technology to increase productivity and decrease costs. In the healthcare industry, the technology is eliminating a spectrum of medical errors such as diagnosis, medication and prescription errors. In the field services industries, the technologies are cutting costs, shaving hours (not minutes) off workloads and increasing efficiency. Mobile workflow software extends enterprise technology to all the verticals and virtually every business profession. The desktop is an endangered species. Workplace computing now embraces all industries. Real-time Managed Collaboration and Workflow Automation start to converge. The convergence of collaboration and workflow begins to dominate corporate and government business practices. Once highly unstructured and completely unmanaged, new collaboration technology will harness Instant Messaging, Web-conferencing and application sharing. Collaboration becomes highly structured, categorized and contextualized. Managed collaboration will be integrated with automated workflow technology. The coupling will produce immediate productivity gains. Instant Messaging and Presence Awareness will become pervasive as integrated features in applications. The broad adoption phase of Workflow Learning begins. The early adopter concept phase is over. Workforce Optimization, Automated Performance Management, Workflow Learning and Workflow Analytics merge. Workflow automation dominates the Enterprise Application Integration conversation. The convergence of managed collaboration injects immediate productivity gains. Informal Learning dominated by real-time contextual Workflow Learning becomes the overwhelming focus of corporate workforce development initiatives. IBM's aggressive Future of Learning initiative has already specifically defined learning embedded in the workflow as a key component of their strategy. The PeopleSoft-Knowledge Products OEM deal will seed Workflow Learning everywhere. Watch for Epiance and RWD to gain traction. Simulation reaches adolescence and identity crisis phase. The proliferation of simulation technologies continues in several distinct technology sectors including business process management, workflow modeling, gaming, educational publishing, military training, product lifecycle management and business intelligence analytics. Cost-effective, low bandwidth virtual reality technologies will explode as massively distributed multi-player gaming grows exponentially across the planet. Interactive Flash and video on smartphones and tablet PCs become common. The first wave of the Homeland Security expenditures on new simulation innovations will hit the streets. Simulation will become such a broad horizontal enabling technology that it will have to deal with an identity crisis. Is it a distinct concept and technology or is it infrastructure? The experience in the simulation will become more important than the technology. Social Network Analysis Technology is commandeered for productivity. Business2.0 identified Social Network Analysis as the technology of the year for 2003. In 2004, it will become apparent that the technology can be harnessed to improve productivity and cut costs. Automated expertise mining and presence awareness will converge with the technology. In this case, it won't be the technology itself that makes the difference. As an enabling technology it will provide expertise maps with live human experts lighting up the switchboard of the network. Human expertise will shine. The battle for the single business process interface intensifies. There is a fierce battle being fought by several major vendors now vying for the new single business process interface. Each sector and industry leader has a different approach. Enterprise Content Management vendors are advocating "content-based applications". Macromedia is advocating Rich Internet Applications (Flash and Flex) as the dominant interface. IBM, Oracle, BEA and Sun are pitching enterprise portals. SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft are pushing transactional portals as the aggregator of all workflow. Microsoft's Office 2003 will become a single interface into all enterprise applications. And new on the scene, SVG zealots will begin agitating for SVG to drive the new single interface. The one single thing all of these have in common is XML. Agent-based technologies dominate the entire spectrum of technology innovation. Intelligent and smart software will grow in prominence. It will be identified as the ONLY way to offset the Information Tsunami crisis that is approaching the business world. Self-healing networks, autonomous computing, predictive software, adaptive workflows, vigilant security software and self-assembly chip technology will become common. Software that can learn will create a layer between humans and the growing complexity of technology. It will provide a meta-management layer over the massive amount of data that has begun to grow faster than the human mind can scale. Software companions are upon us. There is no other way. Make friends with AI today. The Information Tsunami becomes the top business challenge driving technology innovation. During the recession, cutting costs, integrating technology and optimizing workforce productivity were the top drivers of innovation. Now that the recession has abated, these drivers will still be important but the enterprise, by necessity, will have to deal head-on with the Information Tsunami. Information is doubling every 18 months and the growth rate is accelerating. Technologies and business practices that save time, reduce workloads and automate business processes will enjoy brisk capital investment. Technologies and business practices that do not save time, do not cut costs, do not automate processes and do not show immediate and tangible productivity gains will be isolated as toxins to the Intelligent Enterprise. The Tsunami will only engulf those companies that do not act now to adapt to the growing wave of content and data. The wave cannot be stopped so it has to be conquered. Technology, particularly agent-based software, is the only alternative. Time will become the metric that dominates all automation technology. [Jay butts in.] I can't resist asking, "How much is it worth to you to see the future ahead of the rest of the crowd?" Join us here. .