Business leaders now accept that their organizations’ future success is bound up with their ability to keep pace with technology. CIOs have to play a key role in helping these business leaders recognize and seize the opportunities enabled by new trends—but the price of progress will have to be paid, along with new risks assumed.

This week Accenture published its Technology Vision 2012, an annual outlook of the most important emerging technology trends that are predicted to have a critical impact on businesses; a distillation from the experiences of our research teams and the input of our clients. The emerging technology trends are outlined so forward-thinking CIOs will use these to position their organizations to drive growth and high performance, rather than just focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

Technology Vision 2012
In Technology Vision 2012 Accenture identifies context-based services as one of six key trends, predicting that a surge in context-based services is imminent. This is enabled by the convergence of and easy access to many sources of contextual information, including soaring smartphone usage, the expansion of cloud computing, an explosion of social media participation, and the development of powerful tools for aggregating and analyzing multiple forms of data.

CIOs and other IT leaders who have started to leverage contextual data to build a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and habits are establishing themselves as strategic players within their companies. They are teaming more effectively with functions such as sales and marketing and leveraging contextual services to drive new revenue and deliver more value for their businesses. It will be the CIO’s job to frame for the C-suite the opportunity of contextual services—pushing the executives to “dream bigger” and identifying what new products and services are becoming possible as context becomes key.

Other trends
The other trends in the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 include:

• Converging Data Architectures: It is not just the rising volume of data that will challenge organizations, but rather developing new data architectures for effectively handling both structured and unstructured information.
• Industrialized Data Services: Related to the data architecture trend, the true value of data will be realized when it is shared freely. To do that, data is being decoupled from applications and no longer owned by a single business.
• Social-Driven IT: social media are becoming powerful catalysts that are changing the ways customers, employees and partners use technology to interact with the world around them. Most enterprises have yet to catch up to that reality and almost none take full advantage of it.
• PaaS-Enabled Agility: the report emphasizes the importance of the agility of the platform in concert with market viability and a focus on the complementary collection of business services also provided by the vendor. PaaS providers will increasingly offer three additional components: reusable business services, integration capabilities, and extension capabilities.
• Orchestrated Analytical Security: Companies are more “connected” than ever—not only through the Web and mobile devices, but through other non-traditional routes, most notably in the physical world. Think about how connected automobiles and industrial controls are to other systems. Consequently, the risks have increased and how organizations assess the risks is changing.

It is time to focus on technology as a driver for growth and take the bold decisions to move beyond IT’s legacy constraints—constraints that make it too difficult to change, too costly to pursue new opportunities. These trends raise some of the thorny questions about IT skills sets and IT organization structures that need attention now.

The recently published Accenture Technology Vision 2012 poses a challenge to all CIO’s and their IT departments: it is time that the conversations between CIOs and business colleagues should revolve around what the organization needs IT to do—not what IT can and cannot do. Technology and business enablement have become so interconnected that businesses can no longer afford to wait for IT to catch up. So IT departments need to decide which role they want to play and where needed embrace external innovations and capabilities to support the business.