Trends Identified
Architecting resilience: “Built to survive failure” becomes the mantra of the nonstop business
In the digital era, businesses must support wide-ranging demands for nonstop processes, services, and systems. This has particular resonance in the office of the CIO, where the need for “always-on” IT infrastructure, security, and resilient practices can mean the difference between business as usual and erosion of brand value. The upshot: IT must adopt a new mindset to ensure that systems are dynamic, accessible, and continuous—not just designed to spec but designed for resilience under failure and attack.
2014
Accenture Technology Vision 2014
Accenture
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
Context-based services
Forget about the much-discussed Internet of Things. The really interesting news is that data from a host of new sources, combined with technologies that rapidly aggregate and analyze the data, will deliver fresh insights that can give users much more immersive and valuable experiences online—and in the real world.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Converging data architectures
Old approaches to data survive because structured forms of data make IT leaders feel they’re in control. But new approaches to managing unstructured data provide a whole new notion of control—the ability to turn data into new streams of value. Successfully rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to unlocking that value.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture