Innovation happens across technologies. As the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) detailed the key technology themes of its Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR) 2012, its Chief Technology Officer Mr Leong Mun Yuen pointed out that it will also be the convergence of these themes that will pave the way for new and exciting opportunities for innovation.

Mr Leong Mun Yuen presents the Infocomm Technology Roadmap at ITR Symposium 2012.

“Take a camera, tie it with a computer, tie it with storage and tie it with a high performing network, and what you get is Youtube, which has changed the world quite a lot. Innovation happens not just with each of these technologies but how these technologies end up converging,” said Mr Leong, who was speaking at the ITR Symposium 2012 at Marina Bay Sands on 17 August.

ITR 2012 seeks to chart the vision, trends and future developments of the technology landscape in Singapore and align Singapore’s technological direction with global infocomm developments. Developed through a process of scanning, engagement, deep-dive analysis and collaboration, the roadmap clusters over 140 technologies around nine themes:  Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, ICT and Sustainability, Communications of the Future, Social Media, New Digital Economy, User Interface and the Internet of Things.

Mr Cort Isernhagen: The goal and impact of the next ICT paradigm is to pull these disparate systems together into one interconnected network.

Mr Leong also highlighted the importance of tying these themes to the business and ICT needs of various industry sectors such as healthcare, transport, energy, education and retail. “We don’t just discuss technology for the sake of technology. It’s also about addressing the needs of the various sectors and how they can take advantage of the technology,” he said.

Presenting on “The Next Paradigm of ICT Evolution” at the symposium, Mr Cort Isernhagen, Vice President of IDC Insights – International, said the convergence of industry-specific applications and key technology pillars such as mobile broadband, social media, big data and analytics, and cloud services will lead to the creation of a new ICT platform that will deliver millions of apps and touch billions of users around the world.

He said organisations and nations will need to start preparing for the new platform now. “We need to look at what it takes to bring these forces together to create a smart, intelligent and competitive Singapore; to create a system of systems.”

Dr Norman Nie: Big data breaks the linear approximation. With so many observations, we will be able to find patterns within patterns when with a few observations they may just look like outliers.

Citing the example of energy systems, communication systems, transportation systems and buildings, he said, “All these exist to serve the citizens and businesses, but they are still distinct individual systems. The goal and impact of the next ICT paradigm is to pull these disparate systems together into one interconnected network.”

Also presenting at the ITR Symposium 2012 was Dr Norman Nie, Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy at Revolutionary Analytics, who discussed the advent of big data and cloud computing and their impact on private and public sector organisations. In Dr Nie’s view, the upcoming paradigm shift will be “every bit as large and as impactful as the PC emerging in the 1970s and early 1980s and what was then the communication revolution”.

Going forward, there will be a very different approach to the way people use hardware and software, and this will lead to the emergence of new tools and capabilities. For example, highly-parallellised operations in the cloud will enable the next wave of analytics tools to deliver unprecedented insights into big data. “Big data breaks the linear approximation,” he said. “With so many observations, we will be able to find patterns within patterns when with a few observations they may just look like outliers.”

Mr Peter Cochrane: We cannot obtain a sustainable world using any of the technologies that we currently use in our industry. We are systematically destroying our planet a product at a time.

Another key topic that was explored during the ITR Symposium 2012 was sustainability. Discussing the” Internet of Things and Sustainability”, Dr Peter Cochrane of Cochrane Associates identified the confluence of nanotech, biotech, IT and artificial intelligence as the next tech hotspot. He described a world where products, processes and services are embedded with intelligence and human beings form symbiotic relationships with machines. He also spoke about the possibilities of 3D printing, where materials can be programmed to form 3D objects with a predefined shape and function, setting off a cycle of regeneration and re-use. Cautioning that “we are systematically destroying our planet a product at a time”, he said there was an urgent need to make use of IT in finding new ways to create a sustainable world.

Shifting the focus from a sustainable world to a semi-permeable enterprise, Mr Bo Parker, Managing Director, Centre of Technology and Innovation, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, spoke about the new digital economy and the need for scale and speed as organisations seek to extract more value from the information assets that they have. “Companies that can scale their integration capabilities faster than others will be companies that win in the new digital economy,” he said.

Mr Bo Parker: Companies that can scale their integration capabilities faster than others will be companies that win in the new digital economy.

One way to do this is to expose functions through application programming interfaces (APIs) in order to create a semi-permeable membrane around the organisation, which is what the telecommunication services provider AT&T has done. “If you have infrastructure assets and are going to operate at a pace at which the external market is moving, you have to take capabilities and make platforms for them. We have to architect everything we do in a more API-centric way and exposing those APIs to internal and external customers to co-create value,” said Mr Parker.

The topics covered in the main session of the ITR Symposium 2012 were discussed in greater depth in three separate tracks which drilled down into the nine themes of the roadmap. The symposium served as a platform for discussing the technologies and innovation opportunities by tapping on industry insights, experiences and feedback from the community to improve the roadmap and develop a shared technology vision.

The open consultation on ITR 2012 will continue till September 2012 and the public can give its feedback via the website /technologyroadmap . A final report of the ITR 2012 will be published in November 2012 and made available at the same website.