Somewhere around 2002, while I was working on the concept of a Context Value Broker, a colleague asked for my opinion about the future of ICT-systems and services. Not being an acknowledged futurist, that is a hard question to answer. Many who did try were proven wrong, as this prediction of the future of mail delivery in the year 2000 may illustrate.
My answer was that I could imagine a trend in the next decades in which the IT landscape of mainly one-dimensional monolithic solutions would evolve into multi-dimensional ecosystems of pluggable knowledge and function kernels, running on agile platforms. These ecosystems and platforms would provide a collaborative base for new services and solutions that made sense of complex situations and serve users on a 1:1 basis for their individual needs. The actors in this services would be both humans and machines; even although the interpretative capabilities of machines would grow in time.