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The beginning of each year provides us with the opportunity to not only reflect on the successes and challenges of the previous year, but to plan for the opportunities of the current year and dream about the future. For those involved with information technology this is an especially exciting process as the constant evolutions of new tools provides an increasingly faster flow of opportunities that fundamentally change how we work and live. With that mind, this article looks well beyond the next busy season towards the bleeding edge of what may be possible in your firms within the next five year years, or for those of us that remember watching the Twilight Zone presented for your consideration.
Office Applications Evolve to a Service:
Office 2007 will be the last version of Microsofts collaboration software that we load on local workstations, as Redmond responds to Googles web-based suite with their WinMin platform. The most current version of all applications such as email, calendar, contacts, word processing, and spreadsheets will be downloaded to our workstations as needed. While the rest of the world transitions to these web-based tools, accounting firms will be a few years behind as accounting vendors try to completely rewrite their applications to work in this new environment creating opportunities for new competitors.
Web Based Suites Determine Accounting Future:
While todays accounting vendors scramble to retrofit their products to be web based, we believe there will be a new competitor that starts from scratch with the latest technologies and delivers a fully integrated suite of products in a web-based format similar to what Google and Microsoft are doing for their suites. This business suite will integrate all tax, audit, client service, time and billing, and collaboration tools for a fixed fee and also provide all security and disaster recovery, eliminating the need for any internal IT personnel. It will even have scheduling and integrated internal accounting that works!
IT Support Transitions to Knowledge and Process Management:
With technical IT infrastructure completely outsourced, firms will place increased emphasis on training firm personnel on using applications that are constantly evolving and utilizing internal knowledge management tools. Specialists will be on call to resolve questions and help identify issues before they occur and will debrief before and after the days work as part of a constantly evolving support process.
Security Becomes Paramount:
With identity theft and confidentiality becoming key concerns, firms will encrypt all data and require biometric identification including fingerprint and voice recognition to login to the network and view files which will be managed with comprehensive and secure audit trails. This data will be centralized in a secured data vault and remote devices such as laptops and hybrid smart phones will only access the information resources as needed with no data residing on these remote devices. As the size of these data vaults become hundreds times larger, their management will be outsourced to the accounting suite vendors.
Surface Computing Makes Us Really Paperless:
The concept of touch screens became main stream with the Apple iPhone allowing users to pass over pictures or expand them in size with the simple movement of your fingers, but Microsoft will bring the concept into our offices with their Surface Table initiative. While the first model of the table is 30 and allows the user to digitally select movies and music, organize pictures, and drag any of these items to another screen, device or to email them, using multiple surface devices built into a conference table will allow us to completely eliminate paper in our offices (except in the washroom) by turning pages and moving digital images between screens similar to the they way we do today with paper. While bar coding and intelligent scanning will capture data in the proper place of tax documents, firms will utilize touch computing to verify data and voice recognition to input new information as well as ask questions for research.
Video and Data Conferencing Everywhere:
With ubiquitous broadband Internet everywhere, our personnel will be able to communicate with clients and other firm resources from wherever they may be working. Imagine a smart phone or super slim laptop that could allow you to connect to others with video as easily and quickly as instant messaging today. With micro-projection monitors that would show up on the inside of your glasses, users would be able to securely view confidential data, wherever they may be.
Not that long ago, PCs began entering accounting firms and its obvious they had a profound impact on the way every process was done. This evolution is happening faster and faster so looking back at the past twenty years shows us we cant discount the opportunities of the next ten.
This article was originally printed in the AAA Alert newsletter.