In this post I want to talk about the future of data management from a personal perspective.

However, let’s first take a snapshot of the present:

• I’m currently sitting on a train travelling over 70 mph, rolling through the English countryside (yes, it’s raining)
• I’m typing this blog post on a free application (Google Docs) accessed via the web, for free
• I’m listening to music streamed from an online radio station that serves me tracks based on my personal tastes, for free
• I’m checking my email (hosted online for free) to check up on the status of a bunch of different clients across three businesses, five social networks and a membership base of about 10,000 people across the globe
• I’ve just added some tasks to a personalised business system that was built using an online app (Zoho Creator) that costs less than a cup of coffee a day to manage

Could you imagine this 10 years ago? Five years ago?

Five years ago I was an IT contractor pounding the motorways of Britain with a humdrum, predictable career path. Things are very, very different now.

Don’t bother with future navel gazing; the future is already here.

Even with data management in its present form I’m free to create new businesses, shut down old businesses, make new connections, test new directions, make mistakes, fail quickly, learn faster, scale, virtualise - the possibilities are endless.

This is the future of data management and the future is freedom.

This personal freedom is only afforded by data management. I cannot envisage doing the things I now take for granted without such innovations as freemium services, cloud apps, online networking and self publishing.

However, this is not just a freedom I’m experiencing. It’s the same freedom that hundreds of thousands of companies are increasingly able to experience as “IT” effectively becomes leaner, more cost effective, more flexible and incredibly agile.

This agility will create huge disruptions in the traditional marketplaces as leaner companies with smarter ideas of how to leverage data for better service experiences and overall value for money will start to completely transform business models and entire marketplaces.

But what does this all mean? What is the true future of data management?

Here are some predictions:

• Employees will become increasingly virtual, not constrained by location or disability but judged on their abilities to deliver
• Management will be forced to take far more of an entrepreneurial stance; change and agility become the new norm
• The cost of IT applications becomes increasingly commoditised and Cloud computing becomes universally adopted. This creates unprecedented opportunities for innovation and disruption across all marketplaces
• Data silos become increasingly redundant as all data is mastered at source, residing in virtual personalised data stores that federate accurate data within milliseconds of any changes
• Big Data becomes critical in helping organisations create real-time tweaks to customer experience so they can maintain increasingly transient loyalty
• IT roles change dramatically and permanently; for example, there becomes no need for storage and infrastructure management roles. These become archaic terms from an “on-premise IT” past

What do you think? Where do you see the future of data management heading?