Theres a ton of interesting content in Deloittes Tech Trends 2011
Put aside some time to read through this new report from Deloitte, subtitled The natural convergence of business and IT. Here are some of the highlights for me, although I will bet you will have your own favorites:
- A major focus on business intelligence and visualization. As the paper points out, the immense improvement in speed (from technologies such as SAP’s in-memory computing, or HANA) now enables trillions of records to be analyzed and converted from data into actionable data. With the explosion of data, that’s a real need and not just a theoretical possibility
- To make intelligent decisions, you need to have information that lets you see where you are and where you are going, not just where you have been. (Do I detect a use of my rear-view mirror metaphor?)
- The ability to use technology such as text analytics to turn unstructured data into valuable information. One great use of this will be for risk monitoring
- An emphasis on attention to the quality of data and data management. Sorting garbage quickly doesn’t make it better information
- ERP will continue to be vital and strong, with some functionality moving to device and the cloud
- The protection of data remains a critical priority, and the technology to detect threats is improving
- The CIO will become a revolutionary, the catalyst for changing the business
- Social computing is a new fundamental for enterprise IT
- Focus on the user and what they need, rather than on what technology offers
- User experience is key
Do you agree with the Deloitte crystal ball? What do you think of the paper?
Major focus on BI, data quality and data management, CIO as business catalyst, continued strength of ERP.?.? When have those items not been a key driver in the market for the past 5-10 years? Only exception I can think of is when the US market had it's recession 2 years ago and IT trends adjusted accordingly. If you account for that blip... the worst economic situation in most of our lives... there hasn't been much change with what's in that article.
Maybe the only new item is to refer to social media as a fundamental for IT, which I'm not entirely convinced of. Yes, companies are paying attention to social for investor relations, product feedback, alerts, and general market or consumer research... but I'd hardly call it a fundamental of IT just yet. There are examples of data mining the non linear social data but that's still in the outlier stage from what I've read and only certain industries (retail) are doing much there.
http://twitter.com/#!/greg_not_so/status/57635371785273345
All the points are known already - I fail to see what is interesting there that the world was unaware of till this paper came out.
I am pleased that one of the accounting firms is now recognizing these trends - indicating they are moving into the mainstream.
I am also pleased to see recognition that the speed at which data can be turned to actionable information will transform the ability to make quality decisions.
None of these top trends were new to me either. But I believe the report is important because the trends are moving into the mainstream, indicating that use of the technology will become more prevalent than theoretical.