It’s that time of year when the analysts and media predict the year to come in technology. If you missed some of these prediction, see Gil Press’ recap of Forrester’s, Gartner’s and IDC’s predictions.

This year, I thought I would take a stab at some predictions and what may be important to CIOs in 2015. I’m not talking IoT everywhere, even bigger Big Data, and other big or bold predictions – I hope these are closer to reality and practical for the majority of CIOs.

 My 2015 Predictions

1. 1. Enterprises will embrace elements of DevOps – Most enterprises adopted agile development over the last 5-8 years, many have starter to embrace cloud infrastructure, but aligning operational practices remains a final frontier for many enterprises. With maturing cloud service providers and increased pressure on CIOs to innovate, expect them to begin implementing continuous delivery and other automation practices to help reduce costs, improve the frequency of application deployments, and reduce human errors in systems management.

1. 1. Big Data investments may be the Big Bubble for some CIOs – Hadoop and other big data technologies remain complex to configure properly and the skill set is in short supply. Finding Data scientists that understand how to translate smart big data questions into implementations is also difficult. CIOs who don’t help close the skill gap and champion winning analytics programs may find their business colleagues becoming fatigued with big data promises and spending.

1. 1. Successful CIOs will deploy more business meaningful data services – Big data technologies aside, CIOs will look beyond basic “keep the lights on” DBA services and look to mature data services better aligned with analytics and data science programs. Services such as loading (ETL) new data sources, scaling cloud environments for experimental analytic data processing, or researching performance issues with data visualizations are examples.

1. 1. Consolidations in Digital Marketing Providers – There are too many choices and too many vendors in this space and while Marketers should have some appetite to experiment, the plethora of choices will frustrate some and mounting failures (or limited success) will hit others. Expect vendor acquisitions and consolidations which will make it easier for Marketers to select capabilities from a more mature playing field.

1. Boards will require Information Security Roadmaps – 2015 may be the tipping point where the next tier of companies become more active to address information security issues. The appetite to make security investments may still be difficult given other business needs, but Boards are more likely to request their CIOs to formally present security risks, options, and a roadmap.

What do you think? I will follow up at the end of the year.