Many around the world just celebrated the Lunar New Year, marking a time of renewal and for many a time to reset on what’s important. For Accenture, it’s a time when we renew our annual Technology Vision, which outlines some predictions on which technologies will have a significant impact on organizations – for both their IT departments and their businesses overall – in the next few years.
We do this annual report on the future of IT because technology has become pervasive, and is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in every industry, every market and every business. In fact, we believe that Every Business is a Digital Business – technology innovations now represent trends in both business and technology.
Our premise for the Accenture Technology Vision is pretty simple: if you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t prepare for it, and you certainly can’t take advantage of it. Within Accenture, we use the Vision as an input to guide our technology R&D investments; externally, we use the Vision to help our clients not just identify and understand key emerging technologies, but also use them to make their business performance even better – and stand out from the competition.
This year’s Accenture Technology Vision lays out the following major technology trends affecting organizations in the public and private sectors:
- Digital Relationships at Scale: Moving beyond transactions to digital relationships
- Design for Analytics: Formulate the questions, and design for the answers
- Data Velocity: Matching the speed of insight to the speed of action
- Seamless Collaboration: Right channel, right worker, right job
- Software-Defined-Networking: Virtualization’s last mile
- Active Defense: Adapting cyber defenses to the threat
- Beyond the Cloud: Where the Value Lies
Accenture observes that increasing numbers of farsighted organizations are recognizing IT as a strategic asset with which they can renew vital aspects of their operations—optimizing at least and innovating at best. As such, they are investing in the digital tools, the capabilities, and the skills to more easily identify useful data, evaluate it, excerpt it, analyze it, derive insights from it, share it, manage it, comment on it, report on it, and, most importantly, act on it.
But the Technology Vision is just a starting point. Yes, it provides a lens for us to focus in on the technology landscape and shows us where to turn next, but it is only useful if we can translate the Vision into real solutions, addressing real problems in real industries. That’s why this year’s Vision presents 100- and 365-day plans for each technology trend so that organizations can take the insights and act upon them.
Stay tuned to Blogpodium because in the coming weeks I will discuss each of the seven Accenture Technology Vision Trends in more detail and how these trends present opportunities for companies ready to take advantage of them.
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As enterprise data no longer rests solely within the enterprise data center and the transition to cloud is inevitable, organizations are addressing Cloud computing from a Security and Privacy perspective. Security is often perceived as one of the largest inhibitors for moving to the cloud. During the Innovate IT Conference 2012 I had the opportunity to give a keynote presentation in which I addressed the security challenges of the cloud by highlighting 5 principles for crafting a security strategy for the cloud.
