It’s always refreshing to read about Ian Pearson (BT’s futurologist en chef). ITWales interviewed him recently about the stuff he does and how he does it:

Why does BT have a futurologist? It’s kind of like being in a car and having someone looking out of the window as you’re driving along – it’s the business equivalent of that really. If you don’t know what’s ahead, it’s very difficult to steer away from the major threats or steer towards the major opportunities that are ahead of you.

How do you and your colleagues make your predictions? I track future technologies that are coming over the horizon, so as soon as we learn that somebody is doing some research in a particular field, we start putting that together with all the other bits of research that everyone else is doing, and try to figure out what people might try to use that for once it becomes real technology in a decade or so.
(…)
In terms of keeping up, I wouldn’t say that I do. I stopped keeping up round about 1993 or 1994! Since then things have been moving so fast you can’t really keep up, all you can do is hope to not fall too far behind. I don’t pretend to keep track of 100% of new technologies now. I keep track of some of the key ones, and there are still some surprises. If you keep track of most of the important things happening, you can still make some sensible predictions.

In terms of filtering them, the only tools that you can really use are ordinary everyday common sense and some business intuition. If common sense suggests that this isn’t going to work, then it probably isn’t, and that’s based on how I feel or how I imagine my wife would behave or how a little old lady living down the street would behave, so I don’t just look at it from the engineer’s point of view.

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