The "Big Five"
IT trends of the next half decade:
Mobile, social, cloud,
consumerization, and big data
In today's ever more technology-centric
world, the stodgy IT department isn't considered the home of innovation and
business leadership. Yet that might have to change as some of the biggest
advances in the history of technology make their way into the front lines of
service delivery. Here's an exploration of the top five IT trends in the next
half decade, including some of the latest industry data, and what the major
opportunities and challenges are. So what are the key IT trends of the next
half decade? How will organizations adapt to them?
1) Next-Gen Mobile - Smart Devices and Tablets
It's obvious to the casual observer these days that smart mobile
devices based on iOS, Android, and even Blackberry OS/QNX are seeing widespread
use. But comparing projected worldwide sales of tablets and PCs tells an even
more dramatic story. Using the latest sales projections from Gartner on tablets
and current PC shipment estimates from IDC, we can see that by 2015 the tablet
market will be 479 million units and the PC market will be only just ahead at
535 million units. This means tablets alone are going to have effective parity
with PCs in just 3 years. Other data I've seen tells a similar story.
So, while it's still early days yet, it's also
quite clear that enterprises must start treating tablets as equal citizens in
their IT strategies. So why won't they? For several reasons:
Challenges to smart device adoption
·
Smart
devices have a poor enterprise ecosystem today. Enterprise software vendors and IT
departments have organized around older platforms such as Windows and LAMP.
Their infrastructure, skills, and relationships are largely built around an
older generation of IT. In the meantime, iOS and Android have a lot to learn
and to build up to begin to match this world, though they are starting to make
progress in this regard.
·
Many
of the inherent advantages of smart mobile are anathema to structured IT. From app stores to HTML 5, the large and
easy to access application universes of next-gen mobile immediately triggers a
security lockdown response (right reaction, wrong response) from IT. I've even
seen IT departments desire to remove app stores from smart mobile devices
entirely. The solution is probably policy-based screening of apps, but that's a
solution a ways away.
Key adoption insight
A likely approach that will scale is to do as
JP Rangaswami advocates, and "design for loss of control." This
doesn't mean letting go of essential control such as robust security
enforcement, but it does mean providing a framework for users to bring their
own mobile devices to work in a safe manner, including use of apps with
business data under certain prescribed conditions. This unleashes choice and
innovation and vitally, splits the work of adoption and rollout with users that
want to use their favorite mobile devices/app to solve a business problem.
2) Social Media - Social Business and Enterprise 2.0
While mobile phones technically have a broader reach than any
communications device, social media has already surpassed that workhorse of the
modern enterprise, e-mail. Increasingly, the world is using social networks and
other social media-based services to stay in touch, communicate, and
collaborate. Now key aspects of the CRM process are being overhauled to reflect
a fundamentally social world and expecting to see stellar growth in the next
year. As Salesforce's Marc Benioff was very clear in his dramatic keynote at
Dreamforce last month, leading organizations are becoming social
enterprises.
There now seems to be hard data to confirm
this view: McKinsey and Company is reporting that the revenue growth of social
businesses is 24% higher than less social firms and data from Frost and
Sullivan backs that up across various KPIs. The message is that companies are
going to -- and have every reason to -- be using social media as a primary
channel in the very near future, if they aren't already. It's time to get
strategic.
Challenges to social media adoption
·
Social
media is not an IT competency. Simply put, the human interaction portion of social
computing is generally not IT's strong suit. It tends to be treated as just
another application to roll out instead of being integrated meaningfully into
the flow of work.
·
The
more significant value propositions of social requires business transformation. Maintaining a Facebook page and Twitter
account is relatively straightforward and necessary, but it usually won't
generate significant growth, revenue, or profits by itself either. The more
profound and higher order aspects of social media including peer production of
product development, customer care, and marketing require deeper rethinking of
business processes.
Key adoption insight
There are a growing number of established
social media adoption strategies, but probably one of the most effective is to
engage by example. Both leadership inside the company as well as top
representatives to the outside world must engage in social channels to show how
they'd like change to happen.
3) Cloud computing
Of all the technology trends on this list, cloud computing is
one of the more interesting and in my opinion, now least controversial. While
there are far more reasons to adopt cloud technologies than just cost
reduction, according to Mike Vizard perceptions of performance issues and lack
of visibility into the stack remain one of the top issues for large
enterprises. Yet, among the large enterprise CTO and CIOs I speak with, cloud
computing is being adopted steadily for non-mission critical applications and
some are now even beginning to downsize their data centers. Business agility,
vendor choice, and access to next-generation architectures are all benefits of
employing the latest cloud computing architectures, which are often radically
advanced compared to their traditional enterprise brethren.
Challenges to cloud computing adoption
·
Concerns
of control. When jobs depend
on IT being up and working, then you can be sure there will be reluctance to
adopt the cloud. There's also little question that not going the cloud route
will mean short-term job security, but at what ultimate cost? Never mind that
many CIOs and heads of IT just feel they can't yet trust the cloud, despite
many cloud providers being more reliable than internal infrastructure (Google
recently reported four nines across its Gmail and Google Apps services.)
·
Reliability
and performance perceptions. Widespread outages by Amazon and Microsoft in the past has
set back cloud adoption a minor amount, yet uptime is still extraordinary good
by most enterprise standards. More of an issue is moving the enormous datasets
that enterprises now posses into and out of the cloud quickly enough. Backhaul
and other methods will need to improve substantially to address this
satisfactorily for large enterprises.
Key adoption insight
Until cloud computing workloads can be
seamlessly transferred back and forth between a company's private cloud and
public/hybrid cloud, adoption will be held back and favored largely for
greenfield development. Technologies are now emerging to make this possible,
however, and for now, companies should invest in cloud standards (to the extent
they exist today) to build private clouds in order to be in position to start
selectively transferring services out on a trial basis (and being able to bring
them back in safely as needed.)
4) Consumerization of IT
I've previously made the point that the source of innovation for
technology is coming largely from the consumer world, which also sets the pace.
Yet that's just one aspect of consumerization, which some like myself and Ray
Wang are calling "CoIT" for short. Consumerization also very much has
to do with its usage model, which eschews enterprise complexity for extreme
usability and radically low barriers to participation. Enterprises which don't
steadily consumerize their application portfolios are in for even lower levels
of adoption and usage than they already have as workers continue to route
around them for easier and more productive solutions. Another decentralized and
scalable solution is, as with next-gen mobile, to help workers help themselves
to third party apps that are deemed safe and secure.
Challenges to applying consumerization to IT
·
Vendors
provide the UX. Usability and
low barriers to participation won't exist until 3rd party vendors, which
provide a large percentage of IT (often on lengthy upgrade intervals), get the
message and overhaul their apps.
·
Consumer
technology often isn't enterprise ready. At one point, neither was open source, but eventually an
industry that provided value-added services emerged. The same pattern is likely
to happen with popular consumer apps.
Key adoption insight
Consumerization seems especially pernicious to
IT departments because it happens all the time, without their involvement.
Stats vary on "shadow IT", which is in the lower double digits, but
much of it is for consumer apps. IT departments can begin programs in
partnership with other large companies (to distribute the work) to certify
SaaS, cloud, and mobile apps and train workers on data safety, backup, and
integrity for example. Longer term, companies will imbue their IT service
design, solution acquisition, and delivery with user experience and design
approaches and fresh ideas from the consumer world. This will drive more worker
productivity, less user support, and higher innovation in IT solutions.
5) Big data
Businesses are drowning in data more than ever before, yet have
surprisingly little access to it. In turn, business cycles are growing shorter
and shorter, making it necessary to "see" the stream of new and
existing business data and process it quickly enough to make critical
decisions. The term "big data" was coined to describe new
technologies and techniques that can handle an order of magnitude or two more
data than enterprises are today, something existing RDBMS technology can't do
it in a scalable manner or cost-effectively.
Big data offers the promise of better ROI on
valuable enterprise datasets while being able to tackle entirely new business
problems that were previously impossible to solve with existing techniques.
While most companies are still addressing their big data needs with data
warehousing, according to Loraine Lawson, one need only scan the impressive
McKinsey report on Big Data to see the major opportunities it offers on the
business side.
Challenges to adopting big data
·
Big
data requires many new skills. There are a host of advanced technologies and new
platforms to learn to be effective with big data, and the IT departments I've
spoken with are concerned about the skills they must acquire or foster internally
to take advantage of them.
·
Meaningful
use of big data requires considerable cross-functional buy-in. Big data requires tapping into silos,
warehouses, and external systems using new techniques. SOA has similar
challenges because it had to coordinate and align so many parts of the
business. While some big data will be single function, many of the more
intriguing possibilities requires a lot of cooperation across the business and
with external vendors, not at easy task.
Key adoption insight
Big data requires a mindset change as much as
a technology update. This means making open data a priority for the enterprise
as well as an operational velocity that hasn't been a priority before. Big data
enables solving new business problems in windows that weren't possible before.
It also means infrastructure, ops, and development must be part of the same
team and used to working together. This means organizational refinements must
be made to tap into the greater potential.
How IT can evolve to meet the Big Five
I'm beginning to see
that in order to stay relevant, and not become the PBX department, IT
departments must be prepared to take a "Big Leap" to meet the Big
Five. What this Big Leap looks like will be different for every organization,
and their are multiple directions that can be taken. As I wrote on Twitter
recently, the deeply transformational nature of most of the Big Five means IT
must either start leading the business models and evolution of the
organization, or become a commoditized utility while the business figures out
the moves on their own. This almost certainly means open supply chains and
enabling strategic IT abundance via designed loss of control coupled with
emergent and agile approaches to IT. Now that I've explored the Big Five, I'll take
a look at the Big Leap soon and see what the options are for IT -- such as
"The Next Generation Enterprise Platform" that Michael Fauscette
recently posted -- to not only remain relevant in the 21st century, but
become the driver of business.
Can IT become the driver of business or will
the function be absorbed by lines of business as their leaders become digital
natives?
