If we could travel to the past, maybe we all would like a trip to fix a few things. However, on his Into the Universe series on the Discovery Channel, physicist Stephen Hawking argues that time travel to the past is impossible. Hawking was just about to address time travel to the future when I paused the recording from the past to watch the NBA final game that I had also recorded in the past. That game was an exciting and interesting journey through time.
Although Hawking argues that we can’t really travel to the past, the incredible amount of on-demand video content now available allows us to review past events more than ever before. For example, I used to know musicians like Wes Montgomery only from their recordings, but now I can watch them play and learn from them all I want. This video of Wes Montgomery is a nice example of that luxury. We can now easily record many events that will only make it easier for future time travelers to come back to our world.
If we also can’t travel to the future through a wormhole in space-time, we can at least learn about what may happen from organizations like the Pew Research Center, which just published its fourth Future of the Internet survey. 71 percent of the expert respondents agreed with the statement:
“By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”
The study also found that 81 percent agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices.” See slide 13 of this deck.
Just as we can learn from the past through videos and other content, businesses can learn from the past and predict the future from data. Business intelligence is one of the hottest trends in business and IT, because it helps companies understand their business and remain competitive by analyzing and visualizing past results and predicting future results based on data.
Analyst Howard Dresner takes us on a journey through time with this excellent survey and slide deck about enterprise business intelligence adoption, “The Wisdom of BI Crowds.” The slides show that SaaS BI is growing among business users because of its affordable price point and its ease of use, configuration, and deployment. Business users are increasingly implementing a departmental SaaS BI solution to augment the enterprise system already in place. Dresner’s survey is another way to journey through time and see historical use of enterprise BI and where it’s heading today and in the future.
In another post, Chuck Hollis, VP — Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation, writes about a coming revolution in business analytics where business users access self-service business analytics environments, select their preferred data sources and tools, and drive their own analytics, rather than requesting and waiting for reports from IT. Hollis also writes about new enabling technologies, such as flash drives, terabyte-class memory spaces for in-memory processing, and columnar databases.
The above surveys and posts indicate that business intelligence and cloud computing are heading toward a high point, like the summer solstice today in the northern hemisphere.
For a humorous look at time travel, check out these advertisements for current digital devices written as if they had been launched in 1977 by time travelers from today.
With so much information and insights at our fingertips, we can indeed travel through time. With time travel via content, data, information, and surveys, we have never been better equipped to succeed.
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