Technology is evolving at an ever-increasing rate and the impact on businesses can be hard to predict, let alone manage. So FSN writer Lesley Meall finds out which technologies you need to watch out for in 2012.
Look into my crystal ball. Cross my palm with silver. At this time of year the temptation to predict the future becomes almost irresistible – as does the inclination to start making plans (or ‘resolutions’) for the year ahead. So, which technologies are most likely to impact on businesses in 2012? Well, this depends on factors ranging from the unique needs of each individual organisation, through its deployment of existing systems and how well they are being exploited, to the analysts and information technology (IT) pundits who are making the predictions.
In its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012 the analyst Gartner has come up with some fairly predictable candidates: media tablets, mobile-centric applications, context-aware systems and social networking style interfaces, the internet of things, app stores and marketplaces, the next generation of analytics, big data, in-memory computing, extreme low-energy servers, and cloud computing. ‘These technologies will be strategic for most organisations,’ suggests David Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow, and businesses should assess ‘how they fit into their expected needs.’
Not all of these technologies will impact directly on all organisations during 2012, but they do merit some thought, because they each have the potential to create a host of challenges and opportunities. Some organisations will be assessing the potential of some or all of these technology trends and developments for the first time, some will be trying to figure out how to (effectively and economically) integrate them into their existing enterprise systems, and others will already be at the stage where they need to focus more on how to secure and support (some or all of) them.
Around half of the Gartner list reflects the combined force of the rising tide of IT consumerisation and the ‘fifth wave’ of mobile computing, which will create no fewer challenges for businesses in 2012 than it did last year. So the analyst recommends the creation of two mobile strategies, ‘one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario’. These both need to align business, social and financial goals, but they also need to acknowledge fundamental changes in the affordability, use and ownership of IT.
On the B2E front, for example, even the smallest organisation is going to need a workplace ‘bring your own device strategy’, and this is probably going to inform the business’s approach to IT management, development plans, and decisions on purchasing. In a B2B context, businesses need mobile strategies that explore search, social networking and apps and their potential for customer engagement and support, access to enterprise information and systems, and integration with third party applications, plus their impact on user interfaces (UIs).
UIs are taking on the characteristics of social networks, and the world of icons, menus, pointers and windows is being replaced by user interfaces based on touch, gesture, search, voice and video, because of the increasingly ‘mobile-centric’ nature of computing. This ties in with developments in near field communications and the sensors being embedded into mobile phones and all sorts of other devices, which is creating an ‘internet of things’ that uses information about end users, objects, environments, activities, connections and preferences, to provide pervasive, ‘context aware’ computing that doesn’t just meet our needs, but tries to anticipate them.
‘The pervasive global network will be transformational for individuals and for businesses,’ suggests Emily Nagle Green, chief executive of the technology research company Yankee Group, as it will link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce to provide customised content, products and services. ‘This will change the number of people you can reach as potential customers and the pathways to them, and transform their expectations of the products and services you provide,’ she says; likewise the software and systems we use within enterprises.
One area where all of these changes feed directly into the finance function (in addition to impacting on cost), is in ‘next generation’ analytics, business intelligence 3.0 (BI 3.0) and ‘visualisation’ tools. During 2011, FSN explored developments including big data, open data, social networks, cloud computing, mobile technology and sensors, near field communications, and they will combine to create myriad new possibilities in 2012. These range from large-scale analytics provided as an on-demand cloud service, to hardware-software appliances that support the in-memory processing of massive amounts of data.
Analytics is going through a step change, as it moves from retrospective analysis to using real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future, by exploiting various developments including ‘big data’ (something FSN covered here). ‘Being able to measure many more things can allow businesses to understand in more detail what their customers, employees, and processes are doing,’ says Erik Brynjolfsson, director, centre for digital business at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘and that tremendous improvement in measurement creates opportunities to do things differently.’
Widespread availability of mobile devices and the data they provide access is already doing this, and Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson prodicts that mobile BI will ‘go mainstream’ in 2012, with the help of the added on-screen space that tablet devices offer for splicing and dicing data. BI integration with email and social collaboration tools will increase, as FSN explored here and here. ‘Just integrating BI with Excel is no longer enough,’ observes Evelson. The availability of open data (which FSN explored here) will also impact on analytics and BI, with public sector bodies leading the way, in part because of the European Commission (EC).
The new Open Data Strategy for Europe will update the 2003 EC directive on re-using public sector data. As it will make it a rule that all accessible public sector documents can be re-used for any purpose unless they are protected by third-party copyright, prevent the public sector from charging more for this than the cost of meeting the data provision requests, and make it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used machine-readable formats so that it can easily be re-used, the potential for all sorts of new products and services is enormous.
Though new products and services are also among the technologies that being touted as ‘significant’ for businesses during 2012. Some pundits are betting on developments including smarter televisions, Windows 8, next generation netbooks, the iPhone 5, and smart wallets. Like all of the other predictions they certainly have the potential to be disruptive – in one way or another – and as some of them will have an impact on business and finance systems, you can look forward to reading more about all of them at FSN.co.uk during 2012. Happy New Year.
