First of all let me say Happy 2008 to everyone out there. It seems hard to believe that another year has come and gone.

I have sworn off swearing off making predictions and will attempt to come up with a list of things that I think will be important to all of us working in technology.

1. The Economy - In the past few years it seemed to me that IT budgets were increasing and companies were willing to take a chance on newer technologies or new ways of thinking. With the mixed signals on the economy and nobody really knowing if the US is headed for inflation or a recession but it seems from my informal polling that IT budgets are staying flat or increasing at a smaller rate. That could be a local phenomenon but if it is true it means that we will all be back to justifying costs and showing a shorter ROI for our projects.
2. Green - No, not the lime green color that my daughter is crazy about but the environmentally conscience type of green. Before "green" has been seen as something you do because you are an activist. After all, three years ago when I looked at purchasing a car I just couldn't justify the increased cost of a hybrid vehicle. I would have loved to own one but I just couldn't ever see saving enough in fuel costs to justify the larger up front cost let alone the expected higher maintenance costs. Most companies have looked at their "green" initiatives in the same manner. If they could save money by consolidating servers (and save the environment as a side effect) they were willing to do it but nobody in their right mind would spend extra money just to be green. I now see more companies seeing green as an investment that might cost them money in the short term but that will pay off large dividends in the long term. Besides that being green can be used as a competitive advantage if you can show how your competitors are polluting worse than you are.
   I think technology can help out a lot here. Not only are newer computers getting better about saving energy, the newer operating systems like Windows Vista are pre-configured with energy saving settings that will shut down monitors, spin down hard drives, and will eventually put the computer to sleep. There are other technologies that allow me to shut down my machine but have it wake up when it needs to be patched by the IT group so I don't have to leave my machine on all night long one or more nights in the month. There is also tremendous potential for IT applications to be used for tracking energy usage and providing plans for cutting down on the impact of our technology on the environment.
3. Open Source - I think that open source software has become such a large portion of our industry that to think that it will ever go away is just a fantasy. I also don't see it taking over the world and all "closed source" software going away. I think there is room for both models. I still don't see how you can build a long term business on creating and giving away software but if someone can figure a way to do it I am more than willing to use their software. I see a longer term where Linux and a few successful large projects will be supported and a lot of small utilities but the majority of the software industry will still be run on closed source software. I am not sure what the final percentages will be but I will expect that for the next few years at least we will see open source gaining in prominence. I also expect to continue to hear open source touted as the fix to all the software ills just like structured programming and object oriented programming and a lot of other "silver bullet" ideas before it. One thing is for sure and that is the whole collaborative model of most open source projects has proved that quality software that addresses a business need can be developed by large, geographically distributed teams.
4. Communications - A lot of major players in the industry have "unified communications" offerings. If you take a larger look at software a lot of it is about communicating ideas. I am putting software like Microsoft Office, blogging, pod casting, and web conferencing software into this larger bucket of communications software. There are countless articles and studies talking about how we are overwhelmed with data but starving for information. I think a lot of this problem lies in the way that we try to communicate facts to each other. I think that whoever is able to come up with software that will help us weed out irrelevant facts and drill down on the data that will ultimately become information that we can use will have done us all a service.
   I see a bunch of different technologies that can help with this communication issue. Some of the most obvious are the web conferencing and telecommunications type software like skype but there is a large range from the spam filters that we use to the business intellingence and data mining that drives the dashboards, KPIs, and reports that we rely on to software for creating presentations (just an aside, anyone who could figure out a way to stop boring PowerPoint presentations from being delivered would be a real hero). As we are innundated with information and expected to be constantly available this software will become more and more part of our lives. I think it might be too soon for it to appear this year but within a few years I would expect to see the resurgence of "agent" software that will go out and find information that is of interest to us and put it into neat little packages of information that we can get whenever it is convenient for us.
5. Security - I just read a report on the rise in data breaches last year. It is staggering how much data is lost because someone left a laptop in a cab or because somone sent unencrypted data through the mail and the package was lost. I see many more companies implementing a Chief Security Officer or similar position that will be responsible for making sure that data is secured. I also hear more about encrypting data whenever it is at rest so it will not be compromised. We also have to be aware of phishing attacks and other on-line scams. All of these threats will need to be addressed if we are to continue growing our digital economy.

These are a few (fairly obvious) trends that I think will be important in 2008. Who knows, if I am right I may do something crazy in 2009 like predict when the next version of Visual Studio will be released.