Sustainable Business Transformation

It’s that time of the year again — as the holiday season approaches and the calendar year draws to a close, everybody is out there, trying to assess the year that was and trying to forecast the year that will be. In keeping with that tradition we have put together a list of trends and themes that emerge prominently out of our assessment of important developments that have shaped the growth of the business technology market in the recent past, and which will carry over their impact and momentum into the near future. Some of these trends and themes are at the ascent of their curve and approaching their peak, some have reached steady-state where they will continue for a while, while the others have run through their course and are beginning to enter the last leg of their life-cycle before they fade away (only to morph into new avatars of themselves — technology seems to do that thing quite often — the ‘back to the future’ thing).

We present two lists here: a list of 6 trends and a list of 6 themes, in no particular order. Trends pertain to the supply side of the market and are characteristics of products and services that are produced and delivered by vendors and providers. Themes pertain to the demand side of the market and emerge from major pre-occupations of most CIOs and their teams — their key concerns and the stuff that keeps them awake at night. A good way of reading these lists would be for vendors and providers to ask themselves how they can innovate and continue to develop products and services that leverage these 6 trends and help address their customers’ needs and concerns in those 6 thematic areas. Similarly, a good way of reading these lists would be for CIOs to ask themselves how they can stay focused on these 6 themes and deliver results by effectively deploying products and services emerging out of those 6 trends.

Trends (Supply-side)

• Mobility and Mobile Computing
• Web 2.0 / Social Networking and Social Media
• Outsourcing / Off-shoring / Globalization of services
• Virtualization and Cloud Computing
• Analytics and Business Intelligence
• Content and Knowledge Management

Themes (Demand-side)

• Business Alignment: IT Strategy & Governance, support organizational / operational innovation and business transformation
• Stakeholder Relationship Management: accountability to end-users, staff, suppliers, corporate leadership
• Enterprise Architecture: simplification, standardization, consolidation
• ‘Green IT’ and Corporate Responsibility: supporting social and environmental causes championed by the business
• Cost Management: real-estate footprint, power consumption, procurement, licensing, maintenance, salaries and wages
• Security & Risk Management: data security, customer privacy, access control, disaster management, business continuity

We recognize that there may be many trends as well as themes, other than those we have identified here above, that may be equally (or more) important within specific pockets or niches of the business technology market world-wide. By not including more trends and themes we are not suggesting that they are unimportant — we just wanted to keep our lists reasonably short and so decided to pick around half-a-dozen points for each (again, it was not a pre-defined number). Our lists only seek to represent the top few trends and themes aggregated across all industry verticals (such as banking, manufacturing, etc.) and functional horizontals (such as supply chain, customer relationship management, etc.) that the business technology market covers, across all geographies.

Do write in with your comments, especially if you feel we’ve missed out on something really important that needs to be captured in a high-level scan.