Nicholas Evans, vice president and general manager of the CTO Office at Unisys Corporation, carries another title that describes what he does a little better – Innovation Lead. Even though innovation is one of today's buzzwords, Evans has spent his entire 20-year career searching for and identifying emerging trends and innovative technologies for clients. In the mid-1990s, Evans recognized the potential of the Internet for e-commerce and co-founded the National Internet Practice for Coopers & Lybrand. From 2000 to 2005, he led the Emerging Technology practice at BearingPoint by utilizing wireless business process management and RFID. Today Evans, author of Business Innovation & Disruptive Technology, is leading the charge for Unisys, an IT consultancy based in Blue Bell, Pa.
"Throughout my career, I've always looked at emerging technologies to see how I can take those and exploit them for client business benefits," Evans says. "A lot of my current practice is focused on how we innovate. When we started at looking at innovation programs across the company, we found one of the things we needed to do was improve our management capability on how we nurture those innovations, identify them and prioritize them."
So, what's the next big thing? One, Evans is quite interested in some of the visualization and collaboration technologies out there. Second Life, for instance. There are several others tools in that vein that companies can use to communicate and collaborate, he says. One is 3-D, which many think is the new evolution of the Internet—going beyond its two-dimensional nature of today and exploring these collaborative spaces.
"But the biggest may be security," he says. "It's been said that identity may be the key to the future economy. Without true identity and the assurance that people are who they say they are, it grinds commerce to a halt."
To that end, Evans is founder of the recently launched Center for Ethical Identity Assurance (CEIA), his crack at pulling together all the technologies that are currently out there to harmonize the standards and at the same time raise levels of privacy, he says. "I spend a lot of my time focused on the emerging technologies, but we've got to make sure we get the basics right first," Evans says.
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