Industry-led groups such as MIT's Auto-ID Centre, which is developing open standards for electronic product codes, and the Uniform Code Council, which is developing business data standards using XML, will likewise play power broker roles in establishing common ground across platforms, industries and companies.

Key impact: The data warehouse will become the data retailer. Open standards will make it possible to unlock the potential of corporate information trapped in your unwieldy or inaccessible databases. More data and tools for sharing it will lead to new sources of productivity within your company, such as business intelligence, and new sources of profitability outside your organisation. For example, consolidated data from similar products or data from across the supply chain can provide invaluable market research, which you can use to improve pricing, promotion, new product development and maintenance. Even a few new connections (perhaps to your closest trading partners - key suppliers and major customers) will add tremendous value, but the biggest gains won't come until major participants across the supply chain make the switch.

The struggle to arrive at a common infrastructure will be long and complicated, but ultimately - think railroad gauges, electrical outlets or even rules for driving - a combination of public, private and consumer interests will force a resolution. For now, most CIOs should avoid committing irreversibly to any one of the competing efforts, but should watch the Darwinian struggle carefully, experiment when possible and adopt particular solutions when the business case justifies doing so.

3 Adaptable interfaces. One-size-fits-none user interfaces will evolve into device-independent interactions that can be customised by users or by the application itself as it learns how different users want to send and receive information. The same user will take on different profiles depending on the device she is using at any given time, be it a PC, telephone, PDA or mobile phone. In many cases, devices will communicate directly with each other without the intervention of a user. Next-generation interfaces will be as different from today's icon-and-window model as that paradigm was from the C prompt of DOS.

Enabling technology: Consumer electronics. During the past 10 years, computing has increasingly migrated to non-computer devices made and marketed by consumer electronics companies, the best of which are experts at creating natural man-machine interactions. Manufacturers of video game consoles, digital video recorders and mobile technologies understand that consumers need limited but relevant information at home or on the road, even if the same consumer becomes a power user of more complicated applications back at the office. These devices offer far fewer options than a desktop computer, but appropriately so, and they will point the way to effective interfaces that are specific to the device and transparently obvious to the user.

Key impact: Collaboration becomes device-independent. Recognising that different users will interact with applications using a wide range of devices (many yet to be invented), interfaces will evolve from hard-coded dialogues to real-time requests for information formatted and presented in ways meaningful to the device and the role of the user at any given time. Because of those more natural, adaptive interfaces, the interaction you have with customers, suppliers and employees will become truly collaborative in nature.

4 On-demand scalability. To better handle the rapid pace with which global businesses buy and sell major assets, the next-generation architecture will be capable of rapidly adding or removing capacity and connecting or disconnecting operating units without breaking the network, applications or databases.