Crazy prediction, or crazy serious?

IT has often been a transformative -- even revolutionary – force on government, business and society, yet the clues that can foreshadow these seismic shifts are often buried in the bland market reports that are the staples of the tech industry, like the surging sales of one type of microprocessor, or a certain software application becoming more popular at the expense of another.

But every so often industry analysts and observers lay out a vision of the future that absolutely grabs our attention. Below are six such predictions and estimations from the past year. They conjure a slice of reality that is significantly different from the one we live and work in today.

What’s your take on these bold prognostications? Are they the self-interested ruminations of somebody looking for some attention? Or do they portray a future that you and your colleagues are preparing for? And how so? Do these predictions even apply to government?

You can share your thoughts by using the “Comment” button below. Your comments will appear online and in a special year-end print issue that we will publish in December. Please include your e-mail address in the form so that we can follow up with you directly if we have any questions. We will not post your e-mail address publicly.

1. One out of five businesses will own no IT assets at all by 2012, predict Gartner analysts. They say several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on enterprise networks.
2. Seventy-five percent or more of jobs in stand-alone IT departments will go away by 2015, according to the Corporate Executive Board. Some of the responsibilities of the lost jobs will have moved to external providers or have migrated to mission-focused roles in other departments.
3. One trillion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2013, said Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padma Warrior during a conference keynote speech earlier this year. Added to the current base of about 35 billion devices will be an explosion in remote sensors and new mobile devices, creating huge opportunities for new applications.
4. The government can save $1 trillion in 10 years by harnessing certain proven technologies, asserts the Technology CEO Council. The feds can achieve these savings by consolidating data centers and implementing other IT efficiency measures, using analytic software to root out fraud in spending and entitlement programs, and streamlining government procurement.
5. One in four personal computing devices sold will be tablets by 2015, predicts Forrester analysts.
6. Data will grow by 800 percent in the next 5 years, according to Gartner analysts. Eighty percent of that will be the unstructured variety, like text and media files, that can be the most challenging kind to manage and leverage.