{i}From {b}Daniel Pollick{/b}, Director of Business Infrastructure and Chief Information Officer, DLA Piper UK LLP: www.dlapiper.com {/i}
2013
We start to realise BYOD costs more not less.
Apple’s music and tablet monopoly begins to fade.
Microsoft Surface reinvents the laptop.
We see the first major publicly-known cyber-attack on a law firm.
2023
Brave law firms have started to fall out of love with their office buildings and finally exploit remote and virtual team technology.
The Co-op wills and divorces as many people as it buries (in terms of market share).
The need for offline capability in devices has gone away, to the relief of software designers and IT security professionals everywhere.
The app model has collapsed under its own weight, displaced by holistic super-apps.
Finding stuff on internal IT systems is as easy as finding stuff on the internet.
2053
SCL finally changes its name.
{i}From {b}Hazel Randall{/b}, Associate, DLA Piper UK LLP: www.dlapiper.com {/i}
When Facebook and other social media arrived it had its flurry with employment law as disgruntled employees posted things they shouldn’t about their employers. Social media has moved on a great deal since those pioneer days with the ability for a more tailored approach to privacy depending on the posting, including ‘author only’ postings. The current generation of middle-aged workers are thus the first generation to have protracted use of the more discriminating social media and, as a result, have become incessant diarists with a dedication that would rival any tragic Victorian heroine. I therefore predict a rise in employment claims with employees being able to evidence by time and date every slight employer infraction for a number of years.
{i}From {b}Callum Sinclair{/b}, Partner, DLA Piper UK LLP: www.dlapiper.com {/i}
In 2013, the global technology sourcing market will continue to contract, particularly in troubled EU economies. Organisations will bring more work back in-house to maintain control and rationalise their contract/vendor management functions. Legislatures will push territorial job creation/preservation agendas, impacting offshore and farshore deals. Where deals do happen, we will see some return to the single prime supplier ‘mega-source’ deal, as multi-source ‘best of breed’ vendor deals become too expensive to procure and govern. Factors like service provision through cloud and social media, corporate responsibility, and alternate energy use will feature more prominently. Africa and South America will gain ground as wage pressures continue to push Chinese and Indian cost competitiveness.
For 2023, the way we work will have begun its transformation, with a technology-enabled ‘total mobility’ model involving home and mobile working as standard, and employer-neutral service centres whenever the need to gather in specific locations or access specialist facilities arises. Focus in outsourcing will shift entirely away from location (whether as a determinant of convenience, cost or culture) towards service offering and quality.
By 2053, we’ll have taken matters to the next level, with our species’ new understanding of quantum information processing allowing for instantaneous reliable teleportation between Earth-based locations. The prospect of immediate on-site customer service will give new definition to competitiveness. We might even be ‘3D-printing’ copies of ourselves so that we can be in more than one place at once…
