Early in 2015 Deloittes published their sixth annual Technology Trends report (Tech Trends 2015: The fusion of business and IT). This publication identifies the eight technology trends that have the most potential business impact over the next 12 to 24 months for technology and business.
Reading through the entire report may not appeal to all audiences, so I have attempted to distil the most relevant take-away points from the perspective of the CIO. What does this actually mean on a day-to-day basis? What aspects of this report deserve serious consideration and action for strategy and planning?
- CIO as a Chief Integration Officer
In brief: The CIO role is evolving, with integration at the core of its mission. CIO’s need to harness emerging disruptive technologies for the business while balancing future needs with today’s operational realities.
Actions:
- Engage leadership resources to solicit feedback and understand priorities
- Tap into ideas through new employee and partnership channels
- Prototype and demo to make the possible become feasible
- Evaluate the current positioning, and understand the balance sheet of IT
- Invest in underlying capabilities to improve efficacy
- API Economy
In brief: Application programming interfaces (API’s) are the key to integration, exposing core business assets for reuse, growth, and innovation.
Actions:
- Have a clear API strategy to define the intention, value and audience of the API.
- Establish ownership by placing effort under an IT executive to simplify the path forward
- Evaluate the available tools, platforms and integration possibilities
- Plan big, start small. Businesses should balance payoff with added complexity
- See it through. Drive a sustained campaign for awareness and support, while keeping ongoing documentation and maintenance needs in mind.
- Ambient Computing
In brief: Harnessing the real potential of the Internet of Things. From the growth of embedded sensors and connected devices, focus on translating the possibilities into real business impact.
Actions:
- Beware of fragmentation. Use cases will require cross-organisational collaboration
- Avoid distractions from exciting new technologies by starting with concrete business outcomes.
- Usability should guide implementation, even if the solution is automated
- IoT standards are evolving. Don’t wait to invest until the standards are finalised – help shape them.
- Dimensional Marketing
In brief: A new vision for marketing is being formed as CMO’s and CIO’s invest in technology to reach digitally connected customers. CIO’s can help deliver analytics, mobile, social and web.
Actions:
- Understand the customer journey and focus on authentic engagement
- Big data and predictive analytics should play a role in how you invest in targets and priorities
- Have a holistic approach – explore new channels and tools to complement existing ones
- Authoring, provisioning and measuring usage and effectiveness should be seamless processes that provide users with contextual content across channels
- Social activation – move beyond passive listening to inspiring brand ambassadors
- Software-Defined Everything
In brief: The entire operating environment (server, storage, and network) can now be virtualized and automated.
Actions:
- Employ standardised design techniques. Emphasise templates and commonality to manage complexity
- Infrastructure and application teams should work in tandem for rapid deployment
- Every asset/application should be analysed to determine technical considerations for migration
- Some vendors may accommodate creative financing arrangements
- Consider potential benefits in coupling SDDC initiatives with broader IT transformation effort
- Core Renaissance
In brief: Use existing investments in core systems to form the foundation for growth and new service development. Modernise systems, re-platform solutions and extend legacy systems to fuel new services & offerings.
Actions:
- Have a plan – balance business needs with limitations of existing systems and potential of emerging technology
- Invest deliberately in the core to eventually become a catalyst for growth
- Partner with strategic venders to explore new solutions for existing issues
- Embrace a living approach to architecture with usability, integration, data and security in mind
- Find a burning platform to move the conversation about the core to the centre stage
- Amplified Intelligence
In brief: Companies are applying machine learning and predictive modeling to large and complex data sets. Artificial intelligence is now a reality that is not about replacing workers, but augmenting their capabilities. Advanced analytics can help amplify our intelligence for more effective decision making.
Actions:
- Develop a wish list to guide priorities and reveal what data is needed
- Balance opportunity against expected organisational resistance.
- Let user experience dictate the format, granularity and decisiveness of insights
- Be transparent in intent, and consider programs to re-tool and redeploy workers
- IT Worker of the Future
In brief: Technical talent is scarce, the legacy-skilled workforce is retiring, and skills are needed in the latest emerging, disruptive technologies. Companies need to cultivate the IT worker of the future, with habits, incentives and skills that are inherently different from those in play today.
Actions:
- Incentivise IT leaders
- Rethink hiring. Include externships, hackathons, and recruit those with design aptitude
- Introduce mechanisms to submit, explore, and develop new ideas
- Create a virtual culture – provide tools that support remote workers
- Leverage crowdsourcing, incubators and start-up spaces
- Invest in your own IT workforce to drive retention and encourage referrals
Exponentials
In brief: Science and technology breakthroughs advancing faster than Moore’s law. Fields include: artificial intelligence; robotics; additive manufacturing; quantum computing; industrial biology; cyber security.
Four dimensions for effective innovation strategy:
- Trend sensing: stay on top of new developments. Use “show” versus “tell” in demos and prototypes
- Ecosystems: combine the traditional allies with entrepreneurs, start-ups, venture capitalists, etc
- Experimentation: fail fast and cheap, move forward, and think about the impact, feasibility and risk
- Scaling edges: achieve innovation by establishing new teams on the fringes of the organisation
Ben Ward 