Glimpses of Our IT Future: What’s Green, Mobile, and Regulated All Over?

This resource is from EDUCAUSE Review: "Focusing on “glimpses of the future,” the 2008 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee looked at five IT technologies and trends of importance to higher education: green enterprise computing; location-aware computing; virtual worlds; business process management; and regulatory compliance."

No, it’s not a corny joke your six-year-old might tell. “What’s green, mobile, and regulated all over?” is a fairly succinct description of today’s evolving IT environment. More than ever, we find we are dealing with a new interpretation of Moore’s Law. As technical capabilities continue to double regularly, energy, economic, and regulatory constraints on those capabilities are increasing exponentially as well. The 2008 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee attempted to capture a glimpse of the collective future for IT professionals in higher education, anticipating not only the evolving technologies but also ways to address the ever-evolving constraints placed on our ability to provide the technologies that our institutions have come to expect.