Twelve students from Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and the United States, representing a diversity of academic disciplines, gathered in Budapest for three days to debate technology trends, interpret research data, and share their perspectives on the imperatives for information technology in the next decade.

-œI'm very excited about this program,- says Wolfgang Ebermann, general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker business group in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. -œThese students have great aspirations -” they want to contribute personally to the success of society. For their generation, technology is part of life, and they expect technology to take the next step with them.-

With an estimated one billion people around the world getting ready to enter the workforce, Ebermann says Microsoft product designers are keenly interested in the opinions and perspectives of the -œNetGen,- the first generation of people who have grown up with the Internet. These are the people who will drive demand and shape the future of information technology.

During the conference, the board members interpreted data from a perceptual survey of 150 of their peers, and from that information developed scenarios of information work in the future. Analyst Tom Austin, group vice president at Gartner Group and a Gartner fellow, facilitated the board's predictive work on workplace technologies, and HP's Luc Vogeleer, global services program manager for eLearning Portal Solutions, led a session in which he shared HP's experiences working with educators in Northern Ireland and Sardinia.

The Future of the Workplace

Gartner and the students distilled their individual predictions into a set of five areas where they expect to see the most important workplace changes in ten years' time.

These are the top five predictions determined by the student board:

The Haves and Have Nots of Information Technology

While the board focused its attention on the leading edge of technology, awareness of the global -œdigital divide- was always in the background. Some of the countries represented on this year's Board of the Future -” Brazil, China, India -” are powerhouse economies, yet have vast rural regions where computers are a rare commodity and Internet access is nonexistent. Hungary, a former communist bloc state that joined the European Union last year, is also poor by Western standards.

-œI think the development of the society is a big factor, and in Hungary we have to give society more time,- says Máté Szalay, a researcher and IT student the Technical University of Budapest. -œFor example, when you grow up in a poor region, you learn that you cannot take risks in your company -” you have to feed your family and you can't be sure customers will always come.- This caution, he says, affects business owners' willingness to invest in IT.

-œIn my country, people are completely different and the financial means are different,- says Russian board member Sofya Mezhorina. -œMany companies don't want to move from a hierarchical structure to a more networked, collaborative structure, so empowering employees with information-worker technology may be extremely difficult.-

Rasmus, too, acknowledges that this group of students is not representative of all of the NetGen. -œThey are in a sense the cream of the crop,- he says. -œHowever they are going to be the primary drivers of technology adoption in the workplace, so in that respect they are very strong reflectors of the kinds of work we will see in the future. Through the student survey, we will be reaching out in a much broader way to people who are not as fortunate as these students are, or who are not as technology-savvy, and capture those perceptions as well.-