Trends Identified

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 the Postdigital Catalyst
Technology-centric forces are driving business innovation. Who will lead the charge? Five macro forces – analytics, mobile, social, cloud, and cyber – are hard at work enabling and disrupting organizations of many shapes and sizes. The Postdigital EnterpriseTM provokes and harvests these disruptions by changing operating models, capabilities, and perhaps even business models. Industrialization wasn’t complete when we entered the post-industrial era; it had simply become the new basis for competition. The same holds true for these digital forces in the Postdigital era.
2013
Tech Trends 2013 Elements of postdigital
Deloitte
Mobile Only (and beyond)
The explosion of smartphone and tablet adoption in the consumer world cannot be denied. And enterprises have taken note. Mobile initiatives have popped up in almost every corner of the business – looking to untether the workforce, engage customers more effectively, and reshape business-as-usual. CIOs are scrambling to deal with the outcry. To manage, maintain, connect, and protect devices. To imagine, build, deploy, and promote applications. And all the while, many are singing the gospel of “an app for that,” trying to close the gap between end-user expectations and current offerings.
2013
Tech Trends 2013 Elements of postdigital
Deloitte
Social Reengineering by Design
Shaking off the business constraints of 19th century platforms. Modern corporations owe their structure and operating models to the birth of the industrial age, where bureaucracy, hierarchy, and specialization of labor were paramount for efficiencies and scale. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities, strict processes, and a “C3” (command, control, and communications) mentality are tenets of the model prescribed by Max Weber, adjusted by Henry Ford, and refined by Michael Hammer. Many businesses have found success in the model. But current business practices constrain individual responsibility, accountability, and capability. Sometimes that’s due to real or perceived boundaries of a specific job. Often it’s because people are simply unable to navigate the organization – find the right information, specialists, or decision makers to grow ideas, build relationships with people with similar interests, or effectively work together in a multinational, matrix reporting environment. Compare that with the intended goals of social business1: to amplify individual passions, experience, and relationships for the benefit of the enterprise – invisible connections and characteristics within the physical manifestation of our organizations. Aligning the interests of the individual with the mission of the business and every other employee, while harnessing universal qualities of individual worth: content, authenticity, integrity, reputation, commitment, and reliability. The real potential of social business involves breaking down barriers that limit human potential and business performance. But it requires fundamentally rethinking how work gets done and how value is created in the Postdigital era – social reengineering of the business.
2013
Tech Trends 2013 Elements of postdigital
Deloitte
Design as a Discipline
Design should be much more than a project phase. Design is already part of the IT vocabulary. Functional design. Technical design. Detail design. Testing design. User interface (UI) design. Technical architecture design. And, more recently, user experience (UX) design – a hot area of focus as consumer technology experiences are resetting expectations for corporate IT. Throughout its history, however, design has generally remained a discrete set of deliverables or project phases, completed by specialized teams at distinct points during a project’s lifecycle. Individual facets of design have reflected little understanding of other related project activities, much less the broader context of the business vision and expected outcomes. Meanwhile, usability, intuitiveness, and simplicity have moved from aspiration to mandate, with the business having access to new ways to get what it wants: directly procuring cloud services, digital solutions, and mobile apps that are “good enough” to meet their needs. In this open marketplace for IT, business relevance and user engagement are competitive currency. Many CIOs find their organizations lack the skills and craft to mint the new coin. What’s missing may be a commitment to design as a business discipline, a commitment that takes shape by asking: What benefits would we gain if design were a pervasive and persistent aspect of each part of the enterprise? This kind of thinking moves design from just another software development lifecycle (SDLC) phase to an integral part of the IT environment. It shifts the focus from “How do I meet the requirements?” to “Why is this important in the first place?” and “How could we innovate to improve it?” Enterprises can reach this vision, but it often takes a deliberate approach, intentionally applied, by a new mix of talent. The CIO is positioned to make it happen.
2013
Tech Trends 2013 Elements of postdigital
Deloitte
IPv6 (and this time we mean it)
The backbone of the Internet is straining. And we’re running out of time. Internet Protocol (IP) is how we connect to anyone and anything on the Internet. Every participating device, application, or service has a distinct address – a way to identify itself and communicate with other devices, applications, and services. Today’s IP standard, IPv4, dates back to the 1970s. It allowed for 4.3 billion unique IP addresses, which was more than sufficient to meet the computing demands of the time. Fast forward to 2013, with more than a billion personal computers in use1, a billion smartphones2, many times as many corporate desktops, laptops, network equipment, and servers, and a growing number of non-traditional sensor and actuator devices, including cars, thermostats, aircraft engines, elevators, and vending machines. IP addresses have become a scarce resource, already exhausted in some regions: Asia Pacific (APNIC) ran out in April 2011; Europe (RIPE) in September 2012; and IPv4 in North America (ARIN) will likely be fully assigned by spring 20145.
2013
Tech Trends 2013 Elements of postdigital
Deloitte