So 2011 was the year of “Social” in any aspect. And now Social has arrived in companies. There are better or worse examples, but it is here.
Alan Lepofsky has written a wonderful summary from the employee stand point of what this might mean for you.
Consumerization continuous infiltrating the businesses
With that said, we now have Social Media tools in the businesses arena. But which problem did we want to solve with them? I know social software is the solution to all our collaboration and social networking needs.
It helps connecting people and content we need to get our jobs done and make our businesses successful. But why do we try to make “social” tools into “technology” gadgets. It is all about change, about crowd, about community, but not about IT. Sorry, it is a tool. It might help. So please let the community decide, give them what they had on the consumer side of things: The freedom of choice.
If you do not do that, you will fail and as Alan puts it: Employees start hating social software.
Big data is getting big 2012
The next prediction is an easy one: Big data is getting big this year. But what is the fuzz around Big data. What is the use of it. Again what is the problem someone would want to solve with it? It will help the business to make more out of the data. It will help to drive better and easier analytics. It might give you more information about the thoughts of clients, if you interlink all there available data together.
So lets Hadoop our way into big data. Lets try and learn. Be aware of regulations which might or might not contradict the things you are doing with the data.
Virtualization gets into the cloud
Up to now, we have done virtualization of Compute, Storage. We have added reliable WAN to distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. So we are going cloud. Or as I would put it: IT starts the industrialization of itself. This means that we can choose to “use” infrastructure (IaaS) or platforms as a service (PasS). We can buy it and pay for the usage. Something we were not able to have until now. There are specialized companies, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and others that will give us the needed infrastructure
Important to know if one still wants to administer these solutions, if so you are opting for infrastructure, if you are willing to just use standardized platforms.
At the end, we will see Hybrid solutions of sourced and own-produced IT services.
End User Experience becomes important
With all the trends outlined above end user experience will become more important. How will the business handle the need for freedom with data privacy issues, with regulations and service needs in a partly sourced environment?
As attention to privacy will reach a peak, it justifies a closer look at which regulations are emerging and which have matured, and which technologies are deployed to deal with legal requirements and cultural expectations.
What will be the glue in such a complex environment, where powers are shifting to the user and away from the IT department? How to handle consumerization and the challenges from there?
Businesses need to answer those questions in due time. Otherwise the backbone of the company will suffer.
Anytime, anywhere, anyhow or device proliferation is happening
Today most knowledge workers are probably using 4 different devices (PC, Phone, Business Cell Phone, Smart-phone). But are they really will to carry so much devices? What business are seeing the wish to cut that to probably two: A tablet and a Smart-phone. At least one of them can still be wired, but must not. The ability of having WLAN every where or worst case through Smart-Phone Tethering will solve that issue. So start to plan for those effects. Otherwise your business will choose a supplier able to do so.
Need more insights? Drop me a note. Merry Christmas and a happy new year.