Tech Trends 2013 Roundup |
Wednesday I shared the launch of our fourth annual trends report, Tech Trends 2013: Elements of Postdigital. Since 2010, we have seen trends develop from early stages of adoption to their third or fourth stage of adoption. Over the past four years, the postdigital forces - Analytics, Mobile, Social, Cloud and Cyber - have risen even more clearly as macro trends. Each of the forces is already impacting both business and IT; how the combination of the 5 may fundamentally reshape business remains to be seen.
Each year I reflect on how quickly certain trends evolve. Mobile is a great example. In 2010 the Wireless and Mobility story was about ubiquitous connectivity and device advances – think what was happening in smart phones and tablets at that time! 2011 focused on the growth in enterprise apps with “App”lied Mobility, which saw such rapid adoption that the 2012 chapter was about managing mobile at enterprise scale. We titled that one Enterprise Mobility Unleashed; enterprise implications for prioritizing opportunities and addressing the operational realities involved with the proliferation of mobile solutions. This year, for 2013, we consider mobile’s place as a strategic first – and maybe only – priority for key business use cases. Beyond the app, the very notion of “devices” is exploding into near-ubiquitous connectivity of many physical objects – beyond the smart phone and tablet to signal/sensor and machine-to-machine, and now starting to look at ambient computing and augmented reality (AR) in a day-to-day business context. Mobile fundamentals still apply –improving and innovating by removing limitations based on physical place and time. But the leading (not bleeding!) edge is moving at a rapid clip, making it paramount for IT executives to keep pace with change.
Cloud has also evolved across the years. In 2010, we wrote about the cloud revolution, a new way to acquire or deploy technology focused on the traditional IT layers (e.g., infrastructure, platform, software) and focused on efficiencies of capacity, cost and operations / provisioning. In 2011, the market evolved from looking only at horizontal “capacity” layers to looking at vertical slices of “capability”. In 2012, we reported on the hyper hybrid cloud – the hybrid blend of public and private cloud becomes the norm, and hyper-integration cloud-to-cloud and multi-cloud becomes important. For 2013 cloud has become much more baked-in, and we don’t have an individual trend chapter. Instead, we see it as an integrated part of the postdigital landscape changing the economics and cadence of technology investments allowing “experimental IT” – marginal investment experiments with potential to either stop the experiment or scale it to substantial business value – and catalyzing the Postdigital Enterprise™. Cloud also appears as one part of Reinventing the ERP Engine affecting the deployment and scaling architecture choices. While there’s no individual cloud trend this year, cloud still enables CIOs to change the conversation from systems to capabilities and from technical issues to business impact.
Use Tech Trends 2013 to start conversations about the following: “With the mainstreaming of mobile, social, analytics, cloud and cyber technologies, what’s now possible for us as an organization that wasn’t possible before? What’s possible when using each individually? In combination? If we don’t harness the disruption, what happens to us in the marketplace?” Understand the impacts these trends may have on your business and discover elements of postdigital in your enterprise.
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Mark White Principal Deloitte Consulting LLP |
