Abstract
Predicting IT trends has been a long and important subject for information systems research. IT trend prediction makes it possible to acknowledge emerging eras of innovation and allocate budgets to prepare against rapidly changing technological trends. Towards the end of each year, various domestic and global organizations predict and announce IT trends for the following year. For example, Gartner Predicts 10 top IT trend during the next year, and these predictions affect IT and industry leaders and organization's basic assumptions about technology and the future of IT, but the accuracy of these reports are difficult to verify. Social media data can be useful tool to verify the accuracy. As social media services have gained in popularity, it is used in a variety of ways, from posting about personal daily life to keeping up to date with news and trends. In the recent years, rates of social media activity in Korea have reached unprecedented levels. Hundreds of millions of users now participate in online social networks and communicate with colleague and friends their opinions and thoughts. In particular, Twitter is currently the major micro blog service, it has an important function named 'tweets' which is to report their current thoughts and actions, comments on news and engage in discussions. For an analysis on IT trends, we chose Tweet data because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading on technology. Previous studies found that the tweet data provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively, these studies also identifies that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. Therefore, this study investigates how frequently the predicted IT trends for the following year announced by public organizations are mentioned on social network services like Twitter. IT trend predictions for 2013, announced near the end of 2012 from two domestic organizations, the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and the National Information Society Agency (NIA), were used as a basis for this research. The present study analyzes the Twitter data generated from Seoul (Korea) compared with the predictions of the two organizations to analyze the differences. Thus, Twitter data analysis requires various natural language processing techniques, including the removal of stop words, and noun extraction for processing various unrefined forms of unstructured data. To overcome these challenges, we used SAS IRS (Information Retrieval Studio) developed by SAS to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers a framework for crawling, normalizing, analyzing, indexing and searching tweet data. As a result, we have crawled the entire Twitter sphere in Seoul area and obtained 21,589 tweets in 2013 to review how frequently the IT trend topics announced by the two organizations were mentioned by the people in Seoul. The results shows that most IT trend predicted by NIPA and NIA were all frequently mentioned in Twitter except some topics such as 'new types of security threat', 'green IT', 'next generation semiconductor' since these topics non generalized compound words so they can be mentioned in Twitter with other words. To answer whether the IT trend tweets from Korea is related to the following year's IT trends in real world, we compared Twitter's trending topics with those in Nara Market, Korea's online e-Procurement system which is a nationwide web-based procurement system, dealing with whole procurement process of all public organizations in Korea. The correlation analysis show that Tweet frequencies on IT trending topics predicted by NIPA and NIA are significantly correlated with frequencies on IT topics mentioned in project announcements by Nara market in 2012 and 2013. The main contribution of our research can be found in the following aspects: i) the IT topic predictions announced by NIPA and NIA can provide an effective guideline to IT professionals and researchers in Korea who are looking for verified IT topic trends in the following topic, ii) researchers can use Twitter to get some useful ideas to detect and predict dynamic trends of technological and social issues.
불확실한 환경변화에 대처하고 장기적 전략수립을 위해 기업에게 있어서 IT 트렌드에 대한 예측은 오랫동안 중요한 주제였다. IT 트렌드에 대한 예측을 기반으로 새로운 시대에 대한 인식을 하고 예산을 배정하여 빠르게 변화하는 기술의 추세에 대비할 수 있기 때문이다. 해마다 유수의 컨설팅업체들과 조사기관에서 차년도 IT 트렌드에 대해서 발표되고는 있지만, 이러한 예측이 실제로 차년도 비즈니스 현실세계에서 나타났는지에 대한 연구는 거의 없었다. 본 연구는 현존하는 빅데이터 기술을 활용하여 서울지역을 중심으로 지난 8개월동안(2013년 5월1일부터 2013년12월31까지) 정보통신산업진흥원과 한국정보화진흥원에서 2012년 말에 발표한 IT 트렌드 토픽이 언급된 21,589개의 트윗 데이터를 수집하여 분석하였다. 또한 2013년에 나라장터에 올라온 프로젝트들이 IT트렌드 토픽과 관련이 있는지 상관관계분석을 실시하였다. 연구결과, 빅데이터, 클라우드, HTML5, 스마트홈, 테블릿PC, UI/UX와 같은 IT토픽은 시간이 지날수록 매우 빈번하게 언급되어졌으며, 이 같은 토픽들은 2013년 나라장터 공고 프로젝트 데이터와도 매우 유의한 상관관계를 가지고 있는 것을 확인할 수 있었다. 이는 전년도(2012년)에 예측한 트렌드들이 차년도(2013년)에 실제로 트위터와 한국정부의 공공조달사업에 반영되어 나타나고 있는 것을 의미한다. 본 연구는 최신 빅데이터툴을 사용하여, 유수기관의 IT트렌드 예측이 실제로 트위터와 같은 소셜미디에서 생성되는 트윗데이터에서 얼마나 언급되어 나타나는지 추적했다는 점에서 중요한 의의가 있고, 이를 통해 트위터가 사회적 트랜드의 변화를 효율적으로 추적하기에 유용한 도구임을 확인하고자 할 수 있었다.
