AI/ML in Life Sciences: Evolution, Not Revolution

Posted on May 21, 2025 by NicB72

Introduction

AI and machine learning dominate biotech headlines. They’re pitched as silver bullets—from discovery to clinical trials. But if you’ve lived inside Pharma IT or led digital transformations, you know the truth: AI isn’t a revolution. It’s an evolution. And evolution only works when the environment is ready.

After 25+ years leading IT across Research, Development, and Commercial functions, I’ve seen the cycle repeat. The need for innovation hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the infrastructure: more compute, more data, better tools. Yet the core challenges remain.

Core Challenges

Despite the hype, success still comes down to fundamentals:

Clean, connected, governed data.
Security, permissions, and compliance.
Robust information architecture.

Without these, even the smartest model fails. No AI can paper over a broken data foundation—and the cost of ignoring this reality is wasted time, money, and trust.

Semantic Data Models: An Old Idea, a New Edge

What’s exciting today isn’t entirely new. In the early 2000s at Pfizer, I worked with ontologies and semantic data models—using triples to define relationships:

TP53 — regulates — Cell Cycle
BRCA1 — associated_with — Breast Cancer
Aspirin — inhibits — COX1

These simple triples form knowledge graphs, which are now powering drug discovery and clinical decision support.

The new capability: LLMs can now extract triples from unstructured text and align them to formal ontologies. This bridges natural language with structured knowledge, creating intuitive interfaces and advanced reasoning systems. It’s a powerful addition to the biotech data toolkit.ces to advanced reasoning systems. It’s a powerful new capability in the biotech data toolkit.

Figure: This is a high-level architecture. It shows how LLMs interact with triples, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. They support AI reasoning in life sciences.

Big Data, Content, and Governance

AI needs fuel—large, diverse, high-quality datasets. It also needs access to unstructured content: documents, reports, emails. Yet many organizations still operate with fragmented, poorly indexed data.

The tension is real: innovation vs. control. AI can expose sensitive information as easily as it can surface insights. That’s why security, governance, and trust frameworks must scale alongside AI.

Modern AI helps—NLP can extract structure, AutoML can flag quality issues—but even the best tools require a solid foundation. As one analysis put it: “Without well-organized information, AI-driven insights skew, search fails, and knowledge-sharing initiatives collapse.”

Big Pharma vs. Small Biotech

I’ve worked in both worlds. Each has strengths—and blind spots:

Big Pharma

Scale, data, mature infrastructure.
But siloed systems, legacy baggage, and cultural resistance.
Opportunity: responsibly scale AI across workflows.

Small Biotech

Nimble, cloud-native, therapeutic focus.
But limited datasets and compliance maturity.
Opportunity: build smart, unified ecosystems from the ground up.

In smaller organizations, I’ve built secure digital platforms integrating tools like Benchling, Egnyte, and Microsoft 365 to support both regulated and non-regulated domains. Agility is the edge.pport both regulated and non-regulated domains.

Risk, Opportunity, and Leadership

This moment is full of potential—but also risk. If AI is bolted onto broken foundations, it won’t scale. If organizations invest in semantic data, governance, and interoperability, AI can deliver trusted, explainable, and resilient outcomes.

That requires more than data scientists. It demands digital leadership: leaders who can align data, compliance, and innovation.

Conclusion

AI in life sciences isn’t magic. It’s the next step in a long evolution of data and systems. The winners will be those who architect for intelligence—semantic, explainable, and scalable.

This is our moment to lead. Let’s not chase hype. Let’s build the foundations that turn information into lasting advantage.

SharePoint 2016 – last on premise ?

Posted on May 22, 2015 by NicB72

Having managed an enterprise collaboration space for coming up to 10yrs now and taking the SharePoint journey for a lot of that I want to discuss one big change that I believe is happening over the next 2-3yrs.

Throughout the time I have managed collaboration we were always on premise. We evaluated BPOS which became O365 yearly and for multiple reasons it didn’t work for us. It fell down on functionality, reliability, cost and in the early days security concerns. The magic with large enterprise is the economies of scale plays out well so the cost can be driven down quite well on premise.

Slowly but surely O365 has been closing the functionality gap and although its not closed completely there are now some functional components that make it to O365 first. ie. Oslo/Delve/OfficeGraph.

Reviewing all the material from Ignite and the commentary across the blogosphere we truly believe that SharePoint 2016 will be the last on premise version. When we were planning our SharePoint 2013 upgrade we talked about this at length internally and came to the conclusion as well.

Hybrid offerings means that those companies that are still concerned about certain data can keep that on premise and have the general collaboration and social elements in O365. It looks like one experience to the user.

Hybrid Search now works and can take advantage of the power of Azure and Password Hash, etc. has resolved the authentication and security concerns of the past.

So should you install SharePoint 2016 next year when it is released. In my opinion No. Or at least not at any scale. Instead start your business case now for a pilot in year 2016 of O365 (Exchange, Office, Yammer and SharePoint). With a plan to move full scale in late 2016 or early 2017 to O365 for the majority including social, people profiles and search.

Use the remaining 2015 and 2016 to…

1) evaluate your content with content owners and Information Security to work out what content should be on premise and what can go to the cloud – include legal obviously !

2) Get the other functions, Exchange(Mail), Office Desktop and Social (Yammer) on board. This is a change for all and will create an hollistic collaboration environment and done right and together will accelerate your return on investment,

SharePoint fails

Posted on January 11, 2015 by NicB72

When I attend conferences I hear all the time from other attendees that they have SharePoint at their company but it 1) doesn’t work well, 2) nobody uses it or 3) everyone hates it and hates IT for pushing it on them !

I seem to be in the minority of those companies who have SharePoint and its working very well. So over a drink with a few attendees we discussed why and why not SharePoint succeeds and the findings can be applied to any enterprise software offerings.

1) SharePoint is an infrastructure project, leave it to IT.

Wrong. SharePoint is a end user product, it affects the way you collaborate, share information, find information, find people, socialise, present data, etc.

Yep there is software installation and server build out, if on premise and integration if going Office365 but just putting it out there and sending users a URL is going to fail.

At my company we did several things

Built a governance group of business folk, not IT Business partners (although they were represented as they are also a user), but real business folk. Empowers the business lines and ensures the roadmap is aligned to the business need not hindering it.
Business Sponsor and IT Sponsor. A business sponsor was key to show this was not just another IT solution. Of course it also involved changing the way IT worked and so an IT sponsor was also required. Plus there is large ongoing IT investment therefore a senior IT lead was essential.
Created a forum where anyone interested in Collaboration could attend. Held monthly, a virtual meeting which has 1000’s of attendees. Creates an ownership culture
Power Users and Champions – yep no surprise there. These folk started to appear within around 3months of our initial pilot back in 2007. Over the years some have remained and new ones have joined that list. These folk are used to present with us the collaboration offerings to their business line. They present at our forums and they blog and update our wiki on the collaboration services.

2) SharePoint is not Intuitive

Again I hear all the time that SharePoint is difficult to use and it should be as easy as an iPad. Okay, lets stop a minute. An iPad is a very different kettle of fish.

I do however agree that SharePoint UI is not as easy as it should be and takes a little longer to get used to. However this is because it is trying to get enterprise users to move from the long established content mgmt and lets face it fileshares to a new way of working. We have seen the UI change from SP2007 through SP2010 and SP2013 and it is getting better but there will always be some need for education,

So what did we do. Well…

Ready, Set, Go program – with each new release and for anyone new to SharePoint we created an online program where people could get acclimated with SharePoint. It is a mix of wiki material, one-pagers (in 15 languages), PowerPoints and Video snippets on our internal Youtube solution (built on SharePoint !).
Collaboration Forum – we also used our monthly collaboration forum to get one of our power users to show a feature of sharepoint.
Use Social – we post a tip of the week on our social feeds (internal twitter and our blog) highlighting a feature. Sometimes this comes from ‘How To’ questions submitted to our support group and sometimes its suggested by a user or a team member
Site Visits – Throughout the year members of the collaboration team are at various sites visiting and discussing collaboration with governance members, power users and customers. We use this opportunity to provide training drop in sessions. Where anyone can pop along, ask a question, show us how they use SharePoint or tell us whats wrong with it !
Traditional training – and lastly we do offer traditional classroom training. Some groups still want this and often newly formed teams find it a great way to accelerate their collaboration.

One thing we didn’t do was change the UI heavily. The only thing we did was reduce the number of templates, ban SharePoint Designer from our main collaboration offering and add a custom footer. More on the custom footer in a separate post but briefly it provides Site Information, support information and analytic data to us for planning and forecasting.

Set dumb expectations

Keep the buzz going

Lastly…

Its critical to see SharePoint as part of a bigger end to end Knowledge, Collaboration and Information Strategy for your company. If you end up with SharePoint being used in just some parts of the org and competitors in another its going to devalue your investment and lead to customer confusion and dissatisfaction.

You need to think about how people will find the content they put in, think tagging, taxonomy, folksonomy and the search experience.

You need to think about how to identify the critical content and how to remove/deprioritise the stale/inactive content.

SharePoint is a journey and having been able to keep Collaboration on SharePoint now for over 8yrs at my company has been critical. That strong user network has grown with it and learnt it together. We havent done the traditional thing which is change product every 2-4yrs just because something new is out there !

Office Assistants (more like Cortana and Google Now and less like Clippy)

Posted on January 5, 2015 by NicB72

I need Help!

With Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Easily.Do we see a new series of little helpers to assist us in getting through the day !

Siri and Cortana are part of the listening family of helpers or the Phone A Friend brigade if you remember those gameshows. You ask them a question and they go out and try and find an answer. Sometimes they do it well and sometimes they don’t ! They are getting better as they take context, location and the history of the questions into account.

Google Now and Easily.Do are part of a different family of helpers. They look through locations you tell them, e.g. facebook, email, calendars, linkedin, etc. and they parse together your day. They fill in the gaps so if you have 2 meetings at different locations they will give you travel information and any weather detail that might affect you.

In the travel space there are many apps that also fill in gaps, tripit is a good example. It will take all those emailed itinearies and flight, train, hotel bookings, etc. and stitch them together. Again giving you warning on how long it will take you to get from place A to place B and some other useful data along the way.

Some things are missing though and most of this has been focussed on the consumer space. So here are my thoughts for bringing this into the enterprise.

Clippy (Office Assistant)

Before we do though lets remind ourselves of Clippy. In 1996 Microsoft introduced its office assistant Clippy (later renamed to Clippit). It came with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products, looked like a paperclip and tried to understand what you were trying to do and tried to help.

It was seen as intrusive and annoying.

Welcome to the future – hmmm

So looks like we have gone round circle and the idea of assistants is back with us. It is not really a big surprise. The amount of information that is thrown our way has grown, we are more mobile and the technology has progressed both in processing capability, location awareness and voice recognition.

So what do we need from this new wave of assistants to help us in the workplace.

1) The assistant needs to know me – It needs to understand my role in the organisation, where I fit in the organisation (reporting place, etc.), it needs to understand the purpose of my division/group, etc. – this is critical in providing relevant information and creating connections. As an example if I am searching for information on aeroplane wings then the results presented to someone from Research or Design would be different to the results presented to someone from Finance as we can deduce they are after different things.

2) It needs to know who I work with – not by me telling it but by it learning from my emails, blog posts, content I work on, the sites I visit, my meetings, etc. – having this data again gives the assistant context. If my work tasks for the day have items such as purchase new machine for tablet pressing and all my searches are around machinery then the assistant can intelligently present me results before I even begin a search and can bring me relevant data such as cost and procurement approach before I even ask.

3) It needs to know what I am working on – again by looking at my emails, meetings, task lists, search queries, etc.

4) It needs to know where I am and where others are – locational data is critical to give contextual information. If I am visiting a location in NYC from out of town and am have a meeting on a particular topic then the assistant should tell me of other people who are in the same location who are useful to me. Those people may be located there OR they may also be visiting like myself.

I see an assistant that becomes an integral part of my life and lives across devices and OS’s. It is always watching my email, calendar and tasklist, monitors my other activities such as location, phone calls I make, blogs, content I tag, and is aware whats happening outside in the world 🙂

My Working Day

When I start the day it already presents my day (think Easily.Do and Google Now). My day broken up into little cards/components detailing everything I have planned. It glues it together with other contextual information such as weather and travelling details.

It also provides me information to complete my tasks. The assistant reviews the detail, pulls relevant information together, maybe background on attendees for meetings, details on what we last worked on together, maybe detail where we match in our profiles, for those tasks it pulls everything including process info and people who have been through the process recently and can help me.

I have a personal assistant in my pocket/hand that is one step ahead of me pulling info for me. If there are traffic issues making travel to my next appointment impossible it is scheduling a video conference or telepresence without me having to tell it. If a new attendee gets added to the meeting I get the information on that person to review before the meeting. If new information comes up at the last minute that is critical to the meeting, again it presents it to me in a timely manner and formated to the device I am using and my current context.

Did I mention I can speak to it and ask it about my day, whats up next, what do I need to know, etc. and it talks back to me. Not just presenting that data textually but talking to me when its relevant – again it knows what communication mechanism works based on the context of who I am and where I am.

Millennials

Posted on November 1, 2014 by NicB72

Millennials are the big buzz word of 2014. Just watch this bloomberg video if you don’t believe me. (youtube link)

First lets define Millennials (wikipedia).

They were born 1980-2000 (ish).
This means that they grew up with the internet (I can remember a time before it and dial up connections !)
They grew up with Wifi, youtube, facebook and myspace and with mobile technology.
During their formative years the number of television channels boomed to over 250,
They find information coming to them from every direction,
They don’t visit libraries or read magazines or newspapers as much as previous generations but instead get their information from wikipedia, their social channels and information aggregators.

So what is this all about and why should we care.

1) Well in 10yrs millennials will account for 50% of the workforce according to wikipedia, Forbes, etc.

2) Millennials have grown up with technologies such as social networks, smartphones and the flexibility to use whatever device or app they want.

3) Millennials are known for living in the moment and having huge dreams. More millennials than any previous generation are starting up their own companies.

4) It is expected that Millennials will move continually and on average work for around 10-15 companies in their working lifetime. Lets assume a 30yr career, 25-55yrs old, thats a move every 2-3yrs. Blind loyalty to a company is gone and their driver is interesting, rewarding work.

So for a company to attract and retain millennials the current workplace and tools we impose on them won’t work. Companies need millennials as they are the next gen workforce and of course they will become the buyers of products when the current generation retires/moves on. Its essential to employee this generation, get them money to pump into the economy.

So what needs to change. Well lots, 81% of millennials feel they should be able to set their own hours, and around 80% believe they should be able to wear jeans or whatever they want. Thats a change from the traditional 9-5 worktime and the suit and tie brigade. They also feel the way they progress and the way they are rewarded should be based on value and delivery and not time spent in the office, etc.

So lots of cultural stuff needs to change. I am going to focus though on the technology side.

Millennials change apps on their smartphones very frequently. They have no love of a particular app for long and its more about how the app gets the job done.

They also don’t care much for corporate rules restricting applications they can use and how they can use those applications with corporate data.

Social is key to them. Getting a job completed is about working with others and not the traditional team where a project manager or general manager will construct the team. Millennials will construct their own teams to get the work done and then disband and move on to the next task.

So what do we have so far.

Flexibility – use whatever app, whenever, wherever,
Abstraction and Integration – they expect the data they need to work on to be available anywhere and to be accessible from any of the apps they use,
They expect strong social tools to be available and not constrained by corporate redtape,

Yammer, Chatter, etc

Posted on July 30, 2014 by NicB72

Today you have to choose as an enterprise if you are in the Yammer camp, the Chatter camp or one of the other similiar locked down tools. What frustrates me is that a Chatter conversation cannot mix with a Yammer conversation and vice-versa. We are expected that all the people we need to socialise for work will be on the same tool. By the way this is the same in the consumer social space, Google+ and Facebook don’t mix and match either.

But imagine that you had a cellphone and you could only talk to people on the same carrier as you. Frustrating hey. You’d have to either convince everyone to join AT&T or whoever OR you would have to have a phone for each carrier !

Of course you can phone anybody on any carrier on any network on any device anywhere in the world.

We need the same open-standards for social especially in the corporate space. B2B, B2C, etc. means we do not have control on the tools each person and each company will have and we cannot be constrained in our ability to function, collaborate and progress by the tools.

When will we see open-standards for social. I am not holding my breath. The open standards movements of the 90’s that led to HTML and other advances seems to have given way to closed-walled gardens. These closed-walled gardens are great for the powerful vendors as they lock you into their system. Apple does it with their AppStore ecosystem, Microsoft with their SharePoint/Yammer space, Salesforce with theirs.

I hope for change but suspect it won’t come from these big companies but instead from some small startup that works out the magic sauce to get these to interact. Of course we will then have to watch out for the lawyers and patent trolls. Hopefully the start up will survive.

OrgCharts and User Profiles

Posted on March 4, 2014 by NicB72

We have just finished rolling out a much improved PeopleSearch/OrgChart solution for our enterprise. This was the culmination of 4yrs of effort to move forward the way we look at user profiles and aggregate user information.

Its an exciting time as we now have a rich user profile that will enable so much across the organisation. But let me start at the beginning with what is a User Profile

Its all about Me

A user profile is made up of lots of information about the individual. Some comes from the user themselves typed in, some from HR systems, some is from applications they use and some is derived based on behavior. Lets look at that in some more detail.

Organisation information
What division you are part of, cost center, site, role, title, level in org, who you report to, etc.
Contact Details
Office location (address, etc.), Phone number(s), email address, twitter handle, etc.
Biographical & Background
Biography, Education, licenses & memberships, languages, etc.
Professional Data
Skills, Ask Me About, Region Responsibility (Sales), Product Responsibility, etc.
Application Data
This is where applications would store data such as settings, preferences, etc. stored in a global profile so it can be re-used in other applications. e.g. if you are in R&D and you focus on one particular area that information should be usable by all apps and you shouldn’t have to re-enter it,
Behavioral Information
This is the interesting stuff. Stores websites you visit, searches you perform, content you tag, content you view, etc. – this tells people a lot more about who you are and what you do than anything else. Of course it has to be time bound and old behavior has to be removed,

I don’t want the world to know

People need to have the opportunity to chose what data to share with the rest of the organisation. This becomes especially important in certain countries where data protection and other laws play a strong part.

Of course its more useful the more data the individual shares but it has to be their choice therefore its critical to explain the benefits and alleviate any concerns.

One last point on this. Safe Harbor rules need to be considered and addressed. You need to ensure people know where the data is stored and provide them the ability to view all that is stored about them.

Lots of Complete Profiles – Now what

Now we have a complete profile not just for the individual themselves but for others inthe organisation we can start to do some interesting stuff that really drives productivity.

Search relevancy
We can tailor the search results from a query based on who the person is, location, past search behavior, etc. we can take the query and the user profile to try to work out the intent behind the query. Of course if we can take into account their calendar and recent emails that can give even more context to the query !
Content enrichment
This is a big one. Nobody likes adding meta-data when they upload content into repositories but that meta-data is essential to aid searching and content findability. The user profile can help by suggesting meta-data based on data from the profile and from past behaviour. The user can still override and if they do that will be stored as new behaviour in the user profile
Recommendation engines
Another big opportunity. Solutions can suggest content, people and sites. They take information from the user profile and meta-data on sites & content and other people’s user profiles to make recommendations. Tie into that the ability for the user to rate content and sites and thumbs up/down recommendations, all of which is stored back in the user profile, over time the solutions get better and better at suggesting content.
‘Personal Assistants’
This is the whole Siri/Cortana/Google Now concept. The assistants can provide better answers to questions by taking into account all the information from your profile including that behavioural data.

See how important a well maintained user profile is. Oh and thats a key point, a profile is never finished, it’s like a flower it needs to be looked after, watering and feeding is the updating and revising of that profile, regularly.

Using my iPad in the enterprise

Posted on October 1, 2013 by NicB72

Bit of History

I purchased an iPad 1 in late 2010 as my organization tried to understand how it could help collaboration. We had to make sure our core intranet portal worked well on it for our Senior Leadership and Board who were all getting these devices due to the ease of use and instant on functionality.

That was fine and our intranet design needed little tweaking to work on the iPad.

Its all about the experience

Over the next couple of years we tried to expand use of the iPad for leadership and management and look for other uses such as in the manufacturing and sales space.

It really took off in the sales space with our sales-force preferring the light and unobtrusive product when looking to show vendors/potential customers material about our products. The instant on means no ‘dead-time’ waiting with the customer for the machine to boot up for you to show designs or videos of the product. Additionally its lower cost over laptops means damage in the field is not so much an issue.

Inside the enterprise we saw teams trying to make their apps work in the browser on the iPad but many enterprise solutions use flash or silverlight and that will never work on an iPad. So in those cases Citrix was the answer. But it isn’t. It just presents a Windows desktop on an iPad, small buttons that do not work well with fingers and touch just make it horrible. Lagging also kills the experience dead.

New Shiny iPad

Anyway in 4Q13 I got my new iPad, I had been waiting for the retina Mini and got it as soon as it was released. Specifically I have the iPad Mini Retina with Cellular.

So a few things. This new form factor works even better for me. It is the perfect place between my laptop and my phone. The screen quality is great and of course cellular means I am always connected so thats excellent, yes I can tether a laptop but its a pain. I am using it more and more and leaving my laptop docked more and more.

I did grab a Zagg keyboard for it so that I can do long posts like this and author content properly. The majority of my time though is spent reviewing and providing short feedback/comments on content/design, approving expenses and reviewing budget ! So I often use it without the keyboard.

Many enterprise software solutions have been updated over the last few years and the experience has got a lot better. New versions of Concur (travel and expenses) are great – I actually prefer using Concur on my iPad over my laptop; WebEx has got a lot, lot better for Video Conferencing and Lync from Microsoft is also massively improved; DropBox/Box.Net/OneDrive allow me to sync my content beautifully across devices and QuickOffice or Office4iPad allows me to author.

I still miss a good version of OneNote for the iPad and in its absence over the last few years (a cut down version is now available on iPad) I changed to using EverNote for both my personal and professional content.

One thing though with all this is still security, not of content on the device as Mobile Device Management software has evolved massively so devices can be remotely wiped and Apple has improved its encryption massively. But those cloud based storage options still worry organizations and legal departments. Once that gets resolved and tied in to on premise solutions for Search, etc. it will be truly powerful.

SharePoint and the iPad

So I am a big user of SharePoint for better or worse. Actually I drive the strategy for collaboration so I am to blame (for now) for SharePoint being in my organisation.

How does it work on the iPad. Well its mixed. SP2007 was horrible, SP2010 is better, the UI through the browser generally works, SP2013 through the browser is great, especially with the Service Pack.

File access though, well you are just opening from the browser and no access to local storage so its a little complex and getting stuff uploaded to SP is best done using email enabled libraries.

OneDrive is a good glue for those on O365 but for on premise installations its not a pleasant experience.

To be honest I use the browser UI to review websites, perform searches, read our intranet, etc. We have enhanced our search tool so I can tag content I find for editing on a main device, etc.

For file access I use Acronis Access (was MobileEcho) this lets me sync content bidirectionaly (or not) for offline usage. It also lets me access the entire doc libraries within any sharepoint site for browse use (ie. I dont have to sync for offline use).

I would also recommend looking at SharePlus, Mobile Entree and Filamente.

In conclusion…

So for now I love my iPad, don’t like Citrx, love Concur, I continue to use it more and more, just need the apps and the content to catch up.

e2.0 Blog – bit of a hiatus

Posted on April 11, 2013 by NicB72

Looks like I will be taking another little hiatus as my organization goes through some changes following an acquisition and updates its social policy. Normal service will resume in a few months I promise and 2014 will be much more regular !

e2.0 blog – 2013 Predictions

Posted on January 11, 2013 by NicB72

Apologies that I had no posts in 2012 beyond the predictions. Unfortunately a death in the family resulted in my focus having to be elsewhere.
So here is a restart and my 2013 Predictions

Networked Organizations
CMSWire uses this term and its the best description for something I have talked about for quite some time, its also been called Org2.0, etc. In essence it is where organizations mature and realize that not all the expertise they need is inside the company. They don’t have to employ every skill set. Small companies do this as they have no choice ie. they won’t necessary have an accountant or legal department but instead reach out when they need it. Large companies do this already with IT, outsourcing large elements so they don’t have to have a workforce of thousands !

This year it will become more and more prevalent as companies try to reduce their internal costs. Of course they often pay a premium for these services outside but they don’t pay 24x7x365 so companies that plan properly and understand their business can lower their costs.

In essence this is an evolution of the outsourcing model. The question of course is where it ends, what is core.

Why am I commenting on this ? Well as you move more elements outside and connect with different external entities to provide services you need to be able to collaborate with them. External collaboration will become more important than internal collaboration in the next few years. If you look at the Pharma industry or the aerospace industry this is the case today. Boeing works with many, many different companies and external institutes to develop its aircraft and its essential they can act and collaborate as one.

Personalization & Recommendation engines
Call it the Facebook/Amazon/Google Search effect or the nature of the RSS generation but people want content that is relevant to them and not all the other ‘fluff’. I like the fact that Amazon knows me from my past purchases and recommends stuff to me. I like that Google Search knows my previous searches and what I click on to `tweak’ the relevancy of results.

Millenials expect that in the work place as do more and more general colleagues. When I do a expertise search I want the system to know more about me, my location, content I like, previous searches to recommend people to me. I want solutions that know what I am working on and recommend content to me. When I go into any solution I should be able to tailor it to my needs and it learn about me.

3D Printing will bring a whole new level of collaboration
3D printing might be an odd one here, what does it have to do with collaboration ? Well as teams get more and more widely dispersed its more and more difficult to physically look and understand products in the design stage. When folk used to be in the same physicality they could all look around a product, pick it up, discuss it, look at it from different angles, etc.

I believe 3D printing will bring that back. Imagine a design meeting where each site can print out the product and review it. Then update it in the meeting, reprint it out, etc. Refinement. Everyone wherever they are gets to hold, touch and contribute.

Collaboration again is key here, how do we share those 3D designs, tie in to our normal collaboration tools, etc. 3D printing makes it physical.

Video Conferencing anywhere
Large organisations will struggle to take hold of this because of expensive investment in hardware.
But in essence the hardware becomes irrelevant and video conferencing using the cloud as the converter/interpreter means you can BYO video conf device and VC with anyone. Today its horrible, everyone has to be just about on the same tech. This kills Video conferencing across org boundaries (see networked organizations) and very often inside (e.g. one country office goes with one tech over another). Plug and Play / Bring Your Own video conferencing is the nirvana. It will start to happen in 2013 and it will be pushed by the consumer space.

Big Data (yawn)
Ok, first my little gripe, We have always had big data, it is nothing new ! – ok rant over.
This will be big for the next few years as its a big money earner for software companies, consultancies, enables companies to sell storage and sell cloud compute units !

But as said we have always had big data and we have always had people looking for patterns and analyzing it.
Take a look at Formula 1. I had the chance to visit McLaren in 2001, at that point in testing they had over 100 sensors on the car returning data every millisecond. On top of that they had external data they captured from weather to track temperature and condition. They used all this data from each test and data from races themselves to predict by looking for patterns. That is big data. Its nothing new.

The key here will be how people collaborate and share big data. You can’t email it around ! Uploading and downloading from storage locations isn’t practical either. It will be about ubiquitous access to big data always residing in the cloud but visualized through rich collaborative tools.

Cloud
Cloud will continue to be pushed and many still won’t understand what it is ! But security concerns and resilience will continue to be barriers for large organizations with existing on premise investment.

Just look at the great XBox Live outage over Christmas 2012 or the NetFlix outage or the Google outage, shall I go on !

I have heard many large organizations state that Security is also a concern. Shared data centers, content residing on the same box as a competitors, etc. Legal and InfoProtection departments will worry obviously. Their worry is not really warranted as many of these large companies have moved into data centers run by external companies like HP and guess what those data centers also have competitors data in them ! I believe we will finish 2013 with more companies considering IaaS rather than full cloud offerings like O365.

Windows 8
Windows 8 will get little traction in the enterprise. Many waiting for a point release and waiting to see if the BYOD element can really take off yet and whether Google Chromebooks can be a reality in the enterprise. Why is this important well many organisations tie their version of Office and other collaborative tools to their OS release, ie. when they upgrade Windows they upgrade the rest of the stuff. Additionally Microsoft and other vendors are only releasing their products for newer OS’s ie. many products will not run on WinXP and older non-HTML5 compliant browsers. Until all collaboration vendors make their software fully device/browser agnostic what is on the desktop will impact your ability to collaborate.

Mobile
Companies will attempt to make everything mobile ready but not actually fully realize it is not just about making enterprise solutions accessible on mobile devices. It is about different mobile experiences. Lots of consulting dollars will be wasted exploring and on POC’s ! CIO’s will look good for attempting and saying ‘It works on the iPhone/iPad’ in board meetings !

It will take a few more years before Mobile experience coming first or is designed in parallel rather than a bolt on to existing solutions. Take online training courses that many enterprises have. The experience on an iPad or iPhone will be completely different than on a PC/Mac due to the real-estate, the integration of touch, etc.

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