Winding up the top-ten list, Nucleus delves into trends with labor management to software management to customer management -- and the connections among all three.

No. 6: Capital Moves from Labor to Technology. This will allow companies to reducing hiring, while investing more in IT, the research firm says.

No. 7: The Decade of Smarter Software. "The next decade will be about making software more intuitive, integrated, and self teaching so it makes individual end users more productive."

No. 8: Labor Finally Gets Optimized. Workforce management is advancing rapidly with analytics tools and "data gathered at time and attendance kiosks." Says Nucleus: "Slackers, you've been warned."

No. 9: Healthcare Investment. The advance of electronic recordkeeping will "drive investment in data capture devices and services," along with records-management applications.