Top IT Trends for 2012

Recently Gartner published a summary of the top ten IT trends to expect for 2012. The usual suspect are there, like virtualization and social media. But there are some new ones that are interesting. One in particular is the rapid turnover being exhibited by the young employees in their 20's and 30's. Many of them are not staying in their jobs for more than one year, particularly if they aren't shown clear career progress. They want to be fast-tracked. Also, when they receive training, which of course is the norm in IT, they receive offers from other companies and, not being caught up in the old company loyalty myth, are often gone. It is getting to be a serious problem for IT departments and indeed any functions in the enterprise that require IT expertise, which is a growing number of them.

Another interesting addition to the usual list is that of big data, or data analytics, depending on how you look at it. There has been a trend towards unstructured data for some time, and it continue to grow such that it is now a big industry. How to handle all this data and find business opportunities in it has become a major industry. At first glance, it presents a major opportunity for XBRL, since making good use of unstructured data is what XBRL is all about. However, it could spell its death knell as well, because companies have been slow to adopt XBRL and are being quick to adopt the newer data analytics, which could eventually overrun that window of opportunity for XBRL.

For a summary of the Gartner Top Ten, check out this link.