IT Breaks free

DISTRUPTION: Technology is bursting out from the shackles of its desk-bound past. It has the power to disrupt business like never before.

You might expect a Nokia executive to tell us the mobile industry will change the world. But Rich Green, chief technology officer at Nokia, makes a compelling case. "If you can change Egypt with 140 characters written on a four inch screen," he says, "what can you do with a PC substitute in one out of every four hands?" The revolution in mobile technology is just one form of disruption that will change profoundly the way the world does business in the future. But in all its varying guises, disruption was the number one rated topic by the Tech Leader Group.

Dr. Lynch's proposition is founded on meaning-based computing. "We are about to enter a period of extreme disruption again," he says. "The whole way things are done is going to change. There's always a difference in the technology world between positioning, where someone realizes that something is a good idea, and the reality of being able to do it. Now, technology has caught up with dealing with the real world.

"In social media at the moment, there's a lot of positioning going on. But the reality is to do with the scale of the information and the rate it's growing. You have to use technology that can actually understand meaning, which is very difficult for social media. The word 'wicked', for example, could appear in three different Tweets with a different meaning each time. The simplest way of explaining why this is so important is that all the changes in the history of IT have so far been about the T. What we are talking about is the first change of the I."

Nigel Kendall in Wall Street Journal. More Here