Happy New Year! The holidays are over, so let's get back to work and figure out what you're going to have to study, budget for and implement to stay on track in the coming year. There's lots going on out there, and with businesses still in "do more with less" mode, technology is going to be relied on to improve productivity as much as ever. Here's what's going to matter most to you and your job in the coming months.

Tablets on the Job

We've got the iPad, we'll soon have the BlackBerry add-on tablet, and Android and Windows-based tablets will proliferate. Is your IT department ready to accommodate them, and will you standardize on a platform? Gartner says 80 percent of businesses will offer comprehensive tablet support by 2013. Might as well start now.

A Smartphone in Every Pocket

Despite the expanding universe of smartphones, almost all of them can talk to the most common corporate mail servers. That means we have e-mail pretty much figured out. Now comes the harder part: Delivering apps and corporate data so that workers on the go have as much office connectivity as they need to get their job done on nothing bigger than a BlackBerry screen. The challenge: Those apps and that connectivity aren't as universal as Microsoft's mail infrastructure.

Location-Based Services on the March

And, since almost everyone in your organization has a smartphone with GPS, you have to think about what you will do with the location data? Businesses will look for applications and methods of taking advantage of that info to improve productivity. The most obvious beneficiaries will be the sales team, who'll want to know where they're going, who can be tracked, and who can access their customer files as they drive up to the door.

Productivity via the Cloud

Here's a stat to mull lover: There will be a 25-percent reduction in IT labor hours by 2015, according to Gartner. Why? Outsourcing IT services to cloud-based infrastructure providers. This year the big push will be in data storage and retention. As companies see they can do it quickly and safely via the cloud, more apps and more data will migrate to online implementations. Getting that migration right will be IT's biggest overall challenge of the decade.

Data Growth and Retrieval Solutions

With data storage costs low and only getting lower, no one feels any urgency to control its growth. That's fine - as long as you have an efficient way of storing it and finding what you need. Scaling data storage and retrieval in a growing enterprise is a complex task, made even more complicated as you look beyond the server room to the cloud for possible solutions. You'll deal with issues of data center design, power management, and security as you strive to make room for all those petabytes of data.

Network Capacity in Expansion Mode

So now you've got all that data, how are you going to move it around quickly? We're seeing network interfaces go from 1Gbps all the way up to100Gbps to keep information flowing. The problem: There are stops along the way, like security checks, that slow down data traffic like road blocks. Matching network equipment to improved speeds will be a challenge.

My Robot, My Pal

Finally, one more weird statistic from Gartner: By 2015, 10 percent of your online "friends" will be non-human. "Efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots - automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual." In other words, someday soon the CTO is going to ask IT to come up with a way to interact with customers, suppliers, and partners that feels human but is something else. I don't think anyone's quite ready for this one. I can't wait to see what happens.

-- Don Willmott