Looking to The Year 2012 as My Next Challenge

The ICT industry is at an inflexion point. My career is at an inflection point. Looking at the various enterprise challenges of application integration, business process orchestration and management, services governance, etc there is no doubt still an abundance of interesting architecture problems to be solved, and work to be done, to make enterprise architecture truly a mature practice, and be able to automate as many of the large scale IT engineering process as much as possible.

I am however, moving on to embrace a new personal challenge! Looking at the recent fast faced consumer electronics advances and individual communication and computing behaviour changes, there is so much advances made (and to be made) around social computing, individual generated content, novel collaboration patterns, all fueled by infrastructural advances such as the ever increasing pervasiveness of broadband and personal wi-fi devices, coupled with the vast array of new business models enabled through this massive connectivity. Looking back at the computing advances and paradigm shifts that has occurred in the last 5 years, and then looking into the future of the ICT industry, and indeed the wider world that we all live in, I cannot begin to imagine what the world 2012 will look and experience like!

I am taking on a new role as 'Group Manager - Next Web' at Microsoft Australia. I am going to explore collaborations with some facinating local researchers/startup enterpreneurs, and I would love to see that we create our little hub of innovation right here in Australia - on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I would love to see venture capitalists, angel fundings all recognise that Australia is a fertile ground for great talent, the best minds for designing the next killer application for the Next Web, the most business savvy enterpreneurs, the best environment for applied ICT research, the best market for trialing the next Beta Web application!

This is my new passion, I look forward to meeting many likeminded people in this 'Next Web' community!