Gartner’s 2012 Technology Forecast

The ability to forecast the future trends is extremely important to educators, and even more so to learning technology venture.  Regardless of the scale of learning technology implemented, it is an investment temporally, financially and sometimes, even emotionally. Knowing where the technological pathway is gearing towards would help prevent loss and accelerate decision making while selecting the proper technology fitting for one’s situation. “Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012” seems to provide just that function of forecasting for our current year and perhaps a few more down the road.

This report examines technologies that will have great impact on organizations for the next three years. This report provide a brief description of the technology about their capabilities and reason for their popularity (or potential). I think this is a great starting point for both learning technology venture and the broader umbrella of educators as a general overview is more digestible than plunging into the technology world without any sort of outline for guidance. However, the information in this report is not enough to sustain a big decision making on its own. It merely gives guidance as to what could be worthwhile to explore further.

I do expect to seek out future versions of this report to help drive my professional success. One of the most important role of a consultant is to provide available options to educators and ventures. A report of this sort can give an adequate overview without overwhelmingly detailed. After narrowing down the options of potential exploration grounds, I would definitely recommend to go beyond this type of report by reviewing further, more specific literature and perhaps even exploring various products with an experimental group prior to finalizing a decision on investing in the technology.

Hindsight:

I am a bit bias when it came to selecting this article as I thought that this article applies to my job and the project I am working on a bit more than other articles (perhaps I just failed to realize the purpose of the others). As I joined the project after the technology has been acquired, I was not involved in the purchasing process. However, I am also hoping that I could backtrack in this course to learn or at least be able to understand the rationale behind some of the business decisions my company has made.

 

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