Trends Identified
Social Platforms Will Emerge as a New Source of Business Intelligence
The rapid growth of social media has been eye-popping—especially so in the last few years. Facebook, founded in 2004, now has more than half a billion users and is spending heavily to accommodate more. Twitter’s service generates billions of tweets per month. Social networks are not just a product of and for the young consumer: Many of the world’s Internet users aged 50 and over are active users of social media. And increasingly, businesses and government organizations are using social media to connect their constituents in an effort to improve collaboration. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The evolution of social media will continue to disrupt the way companies do business, posing new challenges to IT as it attempts to harness social media in the enterprise. The key driver of this change? The transformation of social networks into social platforms, each with its own ecosystem to fuel increasingly deeper levels of interaction. Social platforms have three major dimensions: functionality, or the basic capabilities these platforms offer; community, or the groups of people who belong to them; and user identity, the unique name and associated information that characterizes an individual.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
User Experience is What matters
Today, business process design is driven by the need for optimization and cost reduction. But tomorrow it will be driven by the need to create superior user experiences that help to boost customer satisfaction. But in the future, great user experiences will require more layered approaches than what is typical today. Leading IT providers are thinking way beyond the next great touch-screen interfaces or gesture-driven devices. They are preparing to address three specific factors: the integrated user experience, with no cognitive cost of switching from one context to another; a compelling experience, which minimizes tedium and boredom; and a natural device interface – one that involves little or no learning time. Apple has mastered all three factors; for instance, its iPhone and iPod products can be used right out of the box, with little need to resort to a user manual.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Computing fore-cast: Into the clouds
Long foreshadowed under names like “grid computing” and “network computing,” cloud computing is finally gaining momentum. Rather than simply replacing one computing paradigm with another, the era of the cloud looks to create a somewhat chaotic proliferation of options, with many paradigms coexisting. Any layer of the technology stack—from computing power to storage to services—can be sourced from the “cloud” and, because IT needs are diverse, every cloud layer should be able to find a market. Organizations will be free to evolve individual IT models, based strictly on business needs rather than on technology constraints; hybrid, “partly cloudy” models will be the norm. This new, adaptable IT frame - work may make it much easier to manage 4 issues of cost, scale and agility. But decision makers must also be prepared to navigate a new set of tradeoffs: the price of agility may be the loss of some visibility—or some control. Most enterprises will want to take their bearings carefully before heading off into the cloud.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
The new Web
Because of the Web’s reach (1.6 billion devices connected, with this number expected to reach 2.7 billion by 2013), 1 even small changes to its basic capabilities can have enormous potential—changing how people socialize, changing how societies link together and changing how businesses operate. Right now, the Web is in the midst of its most significant overhaul since the first browsers emerged 15 years ago. Low-level engineering work (from networking protocols to browser optimization) is making the Web faster and more robust. New capabilities (location-awareness, online/offline modes, social connectivity and more) are paving the way for whole new classes of Web applications. And a growing set of productivity, communication and integration capabilities is making the Web increasingly attractive as an enterprise platform. The Web world is multivalent: multi-browser, multi-platform, multi- device. It is a world that presents a new set of challenges— privacy, security, control of standards, interoperability— and requires a new set of technical and strategic skills. But very soon, more and more enterprises will find that it is their interest to “speak Web” fluently.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
Devices as doorways
Conventional computers have become only marginally more powerful in recent years; mobile devices, on the other hand, have increased their capabilities tenfold. During the same period, the amount of content on the Web has grown exponentially. The two trends, taken together, are breaking up an age-old paradigm where certain kinds of devices (temple scrolls, record players, or GPS units) give access to certain kinds of content (words, music, or location). That era is ending. We are now entering a world where any device can deliver any content. In such a world, there are many avenues to a given piece of content, and devices—in different shapes and sizes—are simply doorways. A key principle of the new paradigm is that users will tend toward whatever access patterns maximize their own convenience and productivity, whether this means reading a transcript of a voicemail on a tablet computer, making a dinner reservation using a video game console, or approving a purchase order by touching a phone. For enterprises that see the work machine as the sole way to access corporate information—the old paradigm—this trend will initially appear problematic. Soon, however, they will likely see it as an opportunity to get out of the business of hardware support while improving system security. Users will supply their own devices, and the job of enterprise IT will be to provide a secure transport layer for work information. Through the adroit use of virtualization, “webification” or other thin-client technologies, enterprises will be able to rise with the tide of devices.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
Fluid collaboration
Collaboration across time zones and geographies is the new business norm. Given the realities of global workforces, carbon-reduction efforts, and the drive for greater productivity, no one expects these numbers to go anywhere but up. Still, the basic technologies that under-pinday-to-day collaboration (such as e-mail) have changed only incrementally in the past decade. Where will the new capabilities come from to equip a more productive, more effective workforce? There will be three sources:• From innovation around the core functions of e-mail, messaging and voice. As communications become more unified, vendors can begin to deliver features—like robust, unified search—that will have real impact. • By expanding the core suite of tools. The challenges to doing so are less technical than practical. For example, valuable tools to improve virtual meetings already exist, in the form of videoconferencing, screen-sharing, digital whiteboards, and more. But these tools are not universal, interoperable or even always user-friendly. With the growing power of the (universal, user-friendly) Web platform, the equation will change. • By supplementing the core messaging suite with collaboration systems based around the principles of publishing and aggregation. A fast-evolving array of tools for social chatter, wiki writing, tagging, rating and voting will provide enterprises with ways to tap human capital, increase peripheral awareness and sustain engagement.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
The conversation economy
Social computing has brought about substantial change in how people connect, how they converse, and how they get and share information. The social network itself is fast becoming a primary information channel for many people. Any object of attention—rumors, novels, recipes, petitions—can explode in importance and visibility if it taps into the right social channels at the right time. But information can also travel in the opposite direction: social networks are emerging as a rich source of information about consumer sentiment, preferences and desires. One clear implication of all this is that the conversation between organizations and individuals is changing, and customer relationships are being remade. We see three major “discontinuities” in the patterns of business-consumer communications. • Episodic communications are being replaced by continuous interactions;• "Talk at you" broadcast messages are making room for "talk with you" conversations; and • With a powerful media device as close as the nearest phone, companies—and individuals—have a new, powerful ability to “show” instead of “tell.”
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
Fourth-generation system development
From the mainframe era, through client-server, and into the era of the desktop, the history of computing has been shaped by new capabilities (new hardware, new algorithms, new ways of doing things) that in turn stimulate new kinds of demands. Simply giving the 1980s-era personal computer a network connection, for example, turned out to have far-reaching effects on how enterprise systems were designed, built and used. In this decade, a wave of new capabilities will push system architecture into unexplored territory, ushering in a fourth generation of system-building. The forces propelling this new era are, as always, both technological and economic. The technologies range from parallel chip architectures to multi-tenancy, from new data storage techniques to advancements in programming languages. The economies are economies of scale: the cost profile of modern data centers or the efficiencies wrung from the manufacture of mobile chips. But progress may not be as smoothly and broadly distributed as it was in the age of Moore’s Law. Instead, innovations may be more localized, confined to more narrow domains. Competitive advantage will go to those who are aware of the technology hot spots, able to discern what will prove useful—and ready with the skills to seize the opportunity.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
Data + decisions = differentiation
Insightful analytics can help organizations discover patterns, detect anomalies, improve data quality and ultimately take effective action. But as analytics tools have been incorporated into standard offerings from software vendors, it is becoming clear that the real advantage in analytics is gained before the analysis begins—in data collection; and after it ends—in decision making. Analytical maturity varies widely across companies and across industries: some organizations are already integrating analytical decision making into their business processes, while others are still working at basic measurement and collection. In the next phase, what may truly differentiate an organization is whether turning information into action becomes part of its DNA.“Everything elastic” is proving to be a durable concept, whose influence is spreading thanks to the technological developments sketched above. Business executives—and CIOs in particular—should consider reshaping their thinking in line with this concept. The idea of elasticity—scalable, infinitely flexible, adaptive—may be integrated into the very fabric of the business. Only then will high performance be achievable in this new market place.
2010
Accenture technology vision
Accenture
Automation, employment and productivity
Automation is an idea that has inspired science fiction writers and futurologists for more than a century. Today it is no longer fiction, as companies increasingly use robots on production lines or algorithms to optimize their logistics, manage inventory, and carry out other core business functions. Technological advances are creating a new automation age in which ever-smarter and more flexible machines will be deployed on an ever-larger scale in the workplace. In reality, the process of automating tasks done by humans has been under way for centuries. What has perhaps changed is the pace and scope of what can be automated. It is a prospect that raises more questions than it answers. How will automation transform the workplace? What will be the implications for employment? And what is likely to be its impact both on productivity in the global economy and on employment?
2017
A future that works
McKinsey