Trends Identified

Cognitive analytics - Wow me with blinding insights, HAL
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing have moved from experimental concepts to potential business disruptors— harnessing Internet speed, cloud scale, and adaptive mastery of business processes to drive insights that aid real-time decision making. For organizations that want to improve their ability to sense and respond, cognitive analytics can be a powerful way to bridge the gap between the intent of big data and the reality of practical decision making.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Industrialized crowdsourcing - Sometimes more is better
Enterprise adoption of the power of the crowd allows specialized skills to be dynamically sourced from anyone, anywhere, and only as needed. Companies can use the collective knowledge of the masses to help with tasks from data entry and coding to advanced analytics and product development. The potential for disruptive impact on cost alone likely makes early experimentation worthwhile, but there are also broader implications for innovation in the enterprise.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Digital engagement - Context + content for marketing . . . and beyond
Content and assets are increasingly digital—with audio, video, and interactive elements—and consumed across multiple channels, including not only mobile, social, and the web, but also in store, on location, or in the field. Whether for customers, employees, or business partners, digital engagement is about creating a consistent, compelling, and contextual way of personalizing, delivering, and sometimes even monetizing the user’s overall experience— especially as core products become augmented or replaced with digital intellectual property.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Wearables - On-body computing devices are ready for business
Wearable computing has many forms, such as glasses, watches, smart badges, and bracelets. The potential is tremendous: hands-free, headsup technology to reshape how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how you engage with employees, customers, and partners. Wearables introduce technology to previously prohibitive scenarios where safety, logistics, or even etiquette constrained the usage of laptops and smartphones. While consumer wearables are in the spotlight today, we expect business to drive acceptance and transformative use cases.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Technical debt reversal - Lowering the IT debt ceiling
Technical debt is a way to understand the cost of code quality and the impacts of architectural issues. For IT to help drive business innovation, managing technical debt is a necessity. Legacy systems can constrain growth because they may not scale; because they may not be extensible into new scenarios like mobile or analytics; or because underlying performance and reliability issues may put the business at risk. But it’s not just legacy systems: New systems can incur technical debt even before they launch. Organizations should purposely reverse their debt to better support innovation and growth— and revamp their IT delivery models to minimize new debt creation.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Social activation
Over the years, the focus of social business has shifted from measuring volume to monitoring sentiment and, now, toward changing perceptions. In today’s recommendation economy, companies should focus on measuring the perception of their brand and then on changing how people feel, share, and evangelize. Companies can activate their audiences to drive their message outward—handing them an idea and getting them to advocate it in their own words to their own network.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Cloud orchestration
Cloud adoption across the enterprise is a growing reality, but much of the usage is in addition to on-premises systems—not in replacement. As cloud services continue to expand, companies are increasingly connecting cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core systems—in strings, clusters, storms, and more—cobbling together discrete services for an end-to-end business process. Tactical adoption of cloud is giving way to the need for a coordinated, orchestrated strategy— and for a new class of cloud offerings built around business outcomes.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
In-memory revolution
As in-memory technologies move from analytical to transactional systems, the potential to fundamentally reshape business processes grows. Technical upgrades of analytics and ERP engines may offer total cost of ownership improvements, but potential also lies in using in-memory technologies to solve tough business problems. CIOs can help the business identify new opportunities and provide the platform for the resulting process transformation.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Real-time DevOps
IT organizations need to better respond to business needs with speed and agility. IT can likely improve the quality of its products and services by standardizing and automating environment, build, release, and configuration management—using tools like deployment managers, virtualization, continuous integration servers, and automated build verification testing. Popular in the agile world, DevOps capabilities are growing in many IT organizations with either waterfall or agile methodologies.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
CIO as chief integration officer - A new charter for IT
As technology transforms existing business models and gives rise to new ones, the role of the CIO is evolving rapidly, with integration at the core of its mission. Increasingly, CIOs need to harness emerging disruptive technologies for the business while balancing future needs with today’s operational realities. They should view their responsibilities through an enterprise-wide lens to help ensure critical domains such as digital, analytics, and cloud aren’t spurring redundant, conflicting, or compromised investments within departmental or functional silos. In this shifting landscape of opportunities and challenges, CIOs can be not only the connective tissue but the driving force for intersecting, IT-heavy initiatives—even as the C-suite expands to include roles such as chief digital officer, chief data officer, and chief innovation officer. And what happens if CIOs don’t step up? They could find themselves relegated to a “care and feeding” role while others chart a strategic course toward a future built around increasingly commoditized technologies.
2015
Tech trends 2015 - The fusion of business and IT
Deloitte