Trends Identified
What worries CEOs most?
Today’s CEOs are concerned about a wide range of potential and ongoing threats to their business growth prospects. These include catastrophic events, economic and policy threats and commercial threats.We asked CEOs about their organisation’s ability to cope with the potential impact of various disruptive scenarios. The majority thought their organisations would be negatively affected, with major social unrest being cause for the greatest concern (see Figure 3). Indeed, CEOs are far more concerned about this than they are about a slowdown in China, possibly because they’ve already factored the latter into their calculations.
2013
16th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
A three-pronged approach
So what are CEOs doing to make their organisations more resilient in this era of ‘stable instability’? Our survey shows that they’re taking three specific approaches:A) Targeting pockets of opportunity: CEOs are focusing on a few well-chosen initiatives, primarily in their existing markets, to stimulate organic growth. They’re more wary about entering new markets or engaging in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and diluting their resources too much. B) Concentrating on the customer:CEOs are looking for new ways to stimulate demand and foster customer loyalty, such as capitalising on digital marketing platforms and involving customers in product/service development. But they’re also aiming to keep their R&D costs down and make the innovation process more efficient. C) Improving operational effectiveness:CEOs are balancing efficiency with agility. They’re trying to cut costs without cutting value or leaving their organisations exposed to external upheavals. They’re also delegating power more widely and collaborating with organisations to share resources and develop new offerings.
2013
16th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
It’s a question of trust
We’ve discussed what CEOs are doing to make their organisations more agile, more appealing and more profitable. To succeed in, and align, these three goals, CEOs know they’ll have to repair the bridges between business and society. CEOs also recognise the important role that business can play in addressing social challenges and improving national outcomes.
2013
16th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
Relationships at Scale
Businesses need to rethink their digital strategies to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. Although mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services have increased the number of digital connections with consumers, most companies are still just creating more detailed views of consumers, consumer attributes, and transactions. Individually, these connections may represent new types of user experiences, even new sets of sales channels—but that’s not the real opportunity. Taken in aggregate, digital represents a key new approach to consumer engagement and loyalty: companies can manage relationships with consumers at scale.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Design for Analytics
Business intelligence. Data analytics. Big data. Companies are no longer suffering from a lack of data; they’re suffering from a lack of the right data. Business leaders need the right data in order to effectively define the strategic direction of the enterprise. The current generation of software was designed for functionality. The next generation must be designed for analytics as well.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Data Velocity
Business leaders have been bombarded with statistics about the soaring volumes of data that they can mine for precious insights. They have been deluged with articles describing the incredible variety of “external” data hidden in everything from tweets and blogs to sensor outputs and GPS data from mobile phones. But the next perspective on data that deserves attention is data velocity—the pace at which data can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in order to produce insights that managers can act on quickly. As expectations of near-instant responses become the norm, business leaders will rely heavily on higher data velocities to gain a competitive edge.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Seamless Collaboration
It is time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its employees work. The rise in social networking has breathed new life into collaboration. Users’ new social behavior and growing expectation that every app will be “social” are pushing companies to create new user experiences. However, to increase productivity, enterprises must move beyond standalone social and collaboration channels; they must begin to directly embed those channels into their core business processes. The new approach: build social, collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Software-Defined Networking
With virtualization investments already paying off in servers and starting to pay off in storage, businesses must turn their attention to virtualizing the network in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and reap the full value of their virtualization investments. Like other virtualization technologies, softwaredefined networking (SDN) has the ability to radically change the flexibility with which businesses and IT operate. You may think of networking as a low-level technology, but this aspect of it has the ability to transform enterprises. With SDN, businesses can finally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Active Defense
Despite an increasing focus on securing the digital business, IT departments struggle to keep pace with recent advances in security technology. Enterprises know that endpoint security is not enough, but the move to active defense—risk-based approaches to security management, analytics-driven event detection, and reflex-like incident response—isn’t yet happening on a broad scale. Although these technologies are maturing rapidly and communities are forming to expose risks, the biggest barrier is slow adoption of solutions that already exist. IT’s core challenge: get current with best practices in security while getting smarter about the new active-defense possibilities and getting real about the journey ahead.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Beyond the Cloud
No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud. However, cloud computing is no longer an emerging trend. The on-demand, elastic technology needs to be considered in all decisions made today; the key question is not “should we use cloud?” but “how can we use cloud?” More than that: cloud isn’t a single concept. Its individual elements—from IaaS to SaaS to PaaS, from public to private—are as distinct and different from one another as the opportunities for enterprises to use them. So the real “trend” is a shift in focus to the next phase: putting cloud to work and crafting an overarching approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the fabric of the enterprise—with business value uppermost in mind.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture