Tech Trends 2013 summary
Disruptors
Opportunities that can create sustainable positive disruption in IT capabilities, business operations and sometimes even business models.
CIO as the Postdigital Catalyst
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Catalysing value from the elements of mobile, social, analytics, cloud and cyberCIOs can lead the move to tomorrow – reshaping business as usual, and driving innovation. On the one hand, they face unprecedented opportunity for innovation. On the other, the existential threat of disruption. How should business respond? And who better to lead than the CIO? When CIOs harness the convergence of the five postdigital forces, they can change the conversation from systems to capabilities and from technical issues to business impact. Plan big, start small, fail fast, scale appropriately. |
Mobile Only (and beyond)
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The enterprise potential of mobile is far greater than today's smartphone and tablet appsMobile should be top of mind for organisations. But don’t limit your ideas to Mobile First. Think Mobile Only, imagining an untethered, connected enterprise. The next wave of mobile may fundamentally reshape operations, businesses and marketplaces – delivering information and services to where decisions are made and transactions occur. And the potential goes far beyond smartphones and tablets to include voice, gesture and location-based interactions; device convergence; digital identity in your pocket; and pervasive mobile computing. The very definition of mobile is changing. |
Social Reengineering by Design
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How work gets done is no longer constrained by 19th century platformsBusinesses are no longer building technologies just to enable interaction – they are now engineering social platforms for specific context. These platforms can relieve, rather than serve traditional organisational constraints such as deep hierarchies, command-and-control cultures, physical proximity and resource concentration. Social Reengineering can fundamentally transform how work gets done, but it isn’t just a “project.” It’s a strategy. And it’s not serendipity. It’s intentional – by design. |
Design as a Discipline
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Inherent, pervasive and persistent design opens the path to enterprise valueDriven by consumer experience, intuitiveness and simplicity are moving from IT aspirations to enterprise mandates. Design is not a phase; it’s a way of thinking. Beyond look and feel, beyond user interfaces. Isolated in silos of user experience (UX), marketing and product development, individual design functions may be reaching their limits. What’s needed is a collaborative, immersive environment to work together. Design is not just an “IT thing” or a “marketing thing” or a “product engineering thing.” It’s an enterprise thing. |
IPv6 (and this time we mean it)
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Ubiquitous connected computing is straining the underlying foundation of the InternetInternet Protocol is the foundation of networking, but we’ve run out of addressable space for addressable items. The more important it is for your business to connect with the outside world, the more important IPv6 is for your future – and the more urgent this issue is for you today. IP addresses are woven deep into applications and infrastructure, and migration can bring challenges. While there’s no drop dead date for IPv6, the final IPv4 address blocks have already been allocated. Careful and proper adoption will take time for planning, execution and verification. The time to start is now. |
Enablers
Technologies in which many CIOs have already invested time and effort, but which warrant another look because of new developments or opportunities.
Finding the Face of Your Data
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Fuse people and technology to discover new answers in data – and new questions tooHumans do some things really well, while computers are better at other things. It is this particular combination that enables the identification of new patterns and relationships across dimensions of data – structured and unstructured, internal or external, big or otherwise. By combining human insight and intuition with machine number-crunching and visualisation, companies can answer questions they’ve never answered before. More importantly, they can discover new questions they didn’t know they could ask. |
Gamification Goes to Work
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Driving engagement by embedding gaming in day-to-day business processesGamification can encourage engagement and change employee, customer and supplier behaviour, creating new ways to meet business objectives. The goal is to recognise and encourage behaviours that drive performance – sometimes in unlikely places. This trend has moved beyond hype and is already demonstrating business value. Gamification in the workplace incorporates social context and location services to motivate and reward desired behaviours in today’s mobile-social world. |
Reinventing the ERP Engine
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Revving up data, hardware, deployment and business model architectures at the coreIf you could really get ERP cheaper and faster, what would you do differently? Run materials requirement planning (MRP) many times each day? Close the books in a matter of minutes? Optimise delivery routes on-the-fly in response to new orders, traffic or customer preferences? What would it mean for business agility, capability and competitiveness? ERP is no stranger to reinvention, overhauling itself time and again to expand functionality. But the underlying engine has remained fairly constant. That’s now changing. |
No Such Thing as Hacker-proof
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If you build it, they will hack it. How do you deal with that?You’ve either been breached – or you soon will be. Your boss knows it, your business knows it, your board knows it, your customers know it and hackers know it. It’s your job to deal with it. That means changing the way you think about defending yourself. Be more proactive about the threat, and react more rapidly when breaches do occur. Detect them quickly, respond, clean up and adjust your tactics. Be outward-facing, prepared and ready in advance. Anticipate and prevent when possible, but be ready to isolate and encapsulate intrusions to minimise impact. It’s better to lose a finger than to lose an arm. |
The Business of IT
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After reengineering the rest of the business, IT’s children deserve some shoesFragmented processes and systems can prevent IT from effectively delivering on the changing demands of the business. IT may need to transform its own management systems to keep up. Is this ERP for IT? Maybe someday. Today, CIOs are crafting solutions from industry-leading products and testing business cases at each step. And the potential benefits are worth the investment – not only in driving down costs and better managing risks, but in positioning IT as the business partner in provoking and harvesting disruption in the postdigital era. |
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