Information Technology is one of the most dynamic industries with new technologies surfacing frequently. In such a scenario, it can get intimidating for information technology professionals at all levels to keep abreast of the latest technology innovations worth investing time and resources into.

It can therefore get daunting for entry and mid-level IT professionals to decide which technologies they should potentially be developing skills. However, the biggest challenge comes for senior information technology professionals responsible for driving the IT strategy in their organizations.

It is therefore important to keep abreast of the latest technology trends and get them from reputable sources. Here are some of the ways to keep on top of the latest trends in Information Technology.

·         Subscribe to leading Analyst Firms: If you work for a leading IT organization, chances are that you already have subscription to leading IT analyst firms notably Gartner and Forrester. These two firms are some of the most recognized analyst firms with extensive coverage on almost every enterprise technology including hardware and software. These Analyst firms frequently publish reports on global IT spending and trends that are based on primary research conducted on vendors and global CIOs & CTOs. However, subscription to these reports is very expensive and if you are a part of a small organization you may have issues securing access to these reports. One of the most important pieces of research published by these firms happens to be the Gartner Hype Cycle which plots leading technologies and their maturity curve.Even if you do not have access to Gartner research, you can hack your way by searching for “Gartner Hype Cycle” on Google Images and you will in most cases be able to see the plots similar to the one below

With the skyrocketing popularity of Android and iOS operating systems, software developers got a whole new arena opened up. Many of the programmers have progressed to concentrate solely onto Mobile Technology Development. This is mainly due to the high demand as well as numerous lucrative ideas left to explore in the Mobile App world.

Exponential growth of smartphone users

As per the survey by eMarketer, the number of smartphone users across the globe crossed 1 billion almost two years ago. The expected number of smartphone users by 2014 end is 1.75 billion.

With smartphones, iPads and Tablets getting more accessible and less expensive day by day, the development potential for mobile apps is truly vast. The under-penetration in emerging markets like India and China in Asia shows that there seems to still a lot of steam left in the mobile app development industry.

If you’re interested in building modern websites or applications which use ASP, XML, or mobile technology, you’ve heard of Visual Studio .NET.  It is one of the more popular suites of development tools available to aspiring programmers, as it consolidates several different tools and languages into the same development environment, which helps in turn to integrate this code across development languages.  Here are three important benefits to using the visual studio suite:

·         Use of Visual J# - This development tool is specifically oriented towards people who already are familiar with basic Java syntax, and is designed for use by those people to build apps or services which will then run on the Microsoft .NET Framework.  This is useful because it fully supports Microsoft Extensions, among other reasons.  Visual J# was developed completely independently by Microsoft.

·         Utility for Smart Devices – Another huge benefit of using visual studio .NET is the ability to immediately integrate your programming efforts with deployment across a variety of smart devices.  PDAs, smartphones, Pocket PCs, and any device which has a limited amount of resources all require a compact framework for the programming of applications it is designed to run.

·         XML Web Usage and Support – Because XML services aren’t married to any particular technology or programming language, they can be accessed by any system, and this broad-based utility has made the services increasingly popular.  Visual Studio .NET takes advantage of this by fully integrating with XML services, including the ability to create and edit them from scratch.

Jeff Nelson, a former Googler and inventor of Chromebook says on Quora, “One habit I've clung to is writing small prototypes when I'm trying to learn new concepts.
For example, I'll sit down with a book or a web page, and over the course of a few hours, write 30 or 40 programs all of them only a few dozen lines long.  Each program intended to demonstrate some simple concept. This prototyping makes it very easy to try out many concepts in a short period of time.”

Miguel Paraz, Software Engineering Student habit is to “keep a log in a text file or document on my work computer. Before trying to solve a problem, I write it down first. And then I describe the details as they happen.”