Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013

Gartner, Inc. highlightedthe top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

 A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

 The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 include:

Mobile Device Battles
Gartner predicts that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. However, only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big bet and Windows 8 platform styles should be evaluated to get a better idea of how they might perform in real-world environments as well as how users will respond. Consumerization will mean enterprises won't be able to force users to give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices. Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.

Mobile Applications and HTML5
The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. Currently, Gartner separates mobile development tools into several categories.  For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. Nevertheless, native apps won't disappear, and will always offer the best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated fashion.

Personal Cloud
The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives. The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities. Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where they go for all their digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.

Enterprise App Stores
Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms. By 2014, Gartner believes that many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs.

The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment. As a result, mobile no longer refers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets. Cellular technology is being embedded in many new types of devices including pharmaceutical containers and automobiles. Smartphones and other intelligent devices don't just use the cellular network, they communicate via NFC, Bluetooth, LE and Wi-Fi to a wide range of devices and peripherals, such as wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters, and home entertainment systems. The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services while raising many new challenges.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
As staffs have been asked to do more with less, IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners. The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organization to retain and build influence inside its organization and to become a value center in the face of challenging new requirements relative to increasing adoption of cloud as an approach to IT consumption.

Strategic Big Data
Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions. Instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.

Actionable Analytics
Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. 

In Memory Computing
In memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformational opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services. Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats "as things happen." The possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.

 Integrated Ecosystems
The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware. The trend is manifested in three levels. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infrastructure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the client through the apps.

More information on stategic terchnologies and CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com

Big Data Will Drive $28 Billion of IT Spending in 2012

Big data will drive $28 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2013, big data is forecast to drive $34 billion of IT spending. Most of the current spending is used in adapting traditional solutions to the big data demands -- machine data, social data, widely varied data, unpredictable velocity, and so on -- and only $4.3 billion in software sales will be driven directly by demands for new big data functionality in 2012. 

Big data currently has the most significant impact in social network analysis and content analytics with 45 percent of new spending each year. In traditional IT supplier markets, application infrastructure and middleware is most affected (10 percent of new spending each year is influenced by big data in some way) when compared with storage software, database management system, data integration/quality, business intelligence or supply chain management (SCM). 

Big data opportunities emerged when several advances in different IT categories aligned in a short period at the end of the last decade, creating a dramatic increase in computing technology capacity. This new capacity, coupled with latent demands for analysis of "dark data," social networks data and operational technology (or machine data), created an environment highly conducive to rapid innovation. 

Starting near the end of 2015, Gartner expects leading organizations to begin to use their big data experience in an almost embedded form in their architectures and practices. Beginning in 2018, big data solutions will be offering increasingly less of a distinct advantage over traditional solutions that have incorporated new features and functions to support greater agility when addressing volume, variety and velocity. However, the skills, practices and tools currently viewed as big data solutions will persist as leading organizations will have incorporated the design principles and acquired the skills necessary to address big data concerns as routine flexibility. 

More information on Big Data and CRM can be found at www.CRMIndustry.com

Nearly 75 Percent of US and UK Businesses Have Mobile Roles to Fill

At a time when global unemployment rates are hitting record highs, results of research released by Antenna Software finds that the mobility sector may be a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy labor market.  The responses from HR managers at 600 enterprises surveyed for the project found that 74 percent of US and UK businesses currently have mobile positions to fill, with almost 1 in 3 companies (29 percent) bringing on a 'mobile strategist,' indicating that as businesses think through the secular impact of mobility, a growing number are assigning ownership for development and execution of business-wide mobile strategies to a specific individual.

Antenna's research also revealed that the demand for workers with mobile skill-sets will accelerate in the next 12 months, with more than half of all companies surveyed (51 percent) recently creating mobile-specific roles.  In particular 20 percent of companies are planning to create 1-2 new mobile related roles in the next year, with some US and UK businesses, roughly 5 percent, planning to create as many as 5-10 new mobile roles in the same timeframe.

Among those companies with mobile positions to fill, 25 percent have found it difficult to find the right workers, and of those companies the vast majority (93 percent) have indicated it is not due to a lack of applicants, but rather the absence of someone with the right qualities for the job.  In fact, the volume of applicants was actually cited as the key reason that 40 percent of organizations have been easily filling new mobile roles.  These findings point to the importance of clearly defining what skill sets and qualities are most crucial for these new roles as they are created.

Against a backdrop of growing demand for mobile talent is the emergence of a new mobile role – the mobile strategist.  Antenna's research found that nearly 30 percent of companies surveyed currently have a mobile strategist, chief mobile officer, or head of mobile that is devoted specifically to mobile strategy and execution across departments. 

Antenna's research also found that the mobile skill-sets most in-demand with UK and US businesses at the present time are those relating to mobile development and mobile management.  More specifically, 20 percent of businesses are currently recruiting mobile app developers and mobile content creators, while 23 percent are looking to hire those with mobile device management (MDM) expertise.  The uptick in mobile management skills is aligned with the ongoing BYOD trend that many companies are grappling with today as more new devices are released into the market.

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Survey: U.S. Corporations Aim to Tackle IT Challenges with Cloud Computing

Forty-four percent of U.S. executives aim to tackle current IT challenges through leveraging cloud solutions, and they are planning to invest more in cloud computing in the future. That is the finding of an IDC survey commissioned by T-Systems. Corporations expect cloud computing to deliver lower IT costs (26 percent) and to enable them to replace legacy systems (21 percent) and adopt new applications more flexibly (14 percent).

Cloud computing is seen as most likely to deliver solutions for Customer Relationship Management (31 percent), productivity tools like email, collaboration or Office packages (28 percent), online stores, and Enterprise Relationship Management (26 percent each).

Corporations continue to have reservations about security, but they are no longer the decisive criterion against cloud. The concept of security now extends to issues such as how cloud computing will impact compliance requirements or data availability. That is prompting corporations to consider the right cloud type and cloud service needed. Enterprises see an opportunity in the private cloud for providers to fulfill their security requirements and agree on service level agreements. 40 percent of U.S. respondents have implemented a private cloud strategy while only 13 percent are relying on public cloud and 16 percent on hybrid cloud solutions.

In the course of adopting cloud computing, enterprises are increasingly considering new service providers, and they are also considering providers whose services they have not previously used. In ERP more than half are considering providers with whom they have had no previous experience.

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Less Than 1% Of Online Purchases Come From Social Channels

Thirty-nine percent of online retail transactions by new customers start with clicks from paid or organic search results and less than 1% come from social channels according to a new Forrester report.

In order to determine how and when shoppers touch various platforms when completing a transaction online, Forrester partnered with GSI Commerce to examine 77,000 consumer orders made over a period of 14 days in April 2012. Findings in the report include:

-- Multiple platforms influence many buyers. While 33% of transactions by new customers involve more than one trackable touchpoint, 48% of repeat customers visit multiple trackable touchpoints. The most popular platforms include organic search, paid search, and email.

-- Email and direct traffic matter for frequent customers. Thirty percent of transactions by repeat customers start with an email from the retailer, and an additional 30% type the retailer's URL directly into a browser.

-- Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. Forty-eight percent of consumers reported that social media posts are a great way to discover new products, brands, trends, or retailers, but less than 1% of transactions could be traced back to trackable social links.

More information on social  media and CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com

By 2014, 10-15% of Social Media Reviews to Be Fake, Paid for By Companies

Consumers' increased reliance on social media ratings and reviews will see enterprise spending on paid social media ratings and reviews increase, making up 10 to 15 percent of all reviews by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. However, analysts predict that increased media attention on fake social media ratings and reviews will result in at least two Fortune 500 brands facing litigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the next two years.

Organizations who opt to pay for fake reviews can, and have, faced both public condemnation as well as monetary fines. In 2009, the FTC determined that paying for positive reviews without disclosing that the reviewer had been compensated equates to deceptive advertising and would be prosecuted as such.

As the FTC begins to crack down on this practice of fake reviews/ratings, some reputation management companies are taking a different approach, not posting new, fake, favorable reviews, but identifying fake and defaming reviews and requesting the reviewers or host site remove them or face legal repercussions. Gartner analysts said they  expect a similar market of companies to emerge specializing in reputation defense versus reputation creation.

Gartner believes that although consumer trust in social media is currently low, consumer perception of tightened government regulation and increased media exposure of fake social media ratings and reviews will ultimately increase consumer trust in new and existing social media ratings and reviews.

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Six Core Principles to Tap the Power of Social Media

Gartner has identified six core design principles that distinguish social media from other approaches to communication and collaboration, and form the foundation for its unique mass-collaboration value proposition. Business leaders should apply these principles to shift away from a "provide and pray" approach to a motivate and engage strategy.

Participation: Getting Communities to Work for You

Successful social media solutions tap into the power of mass collaboration through user participation. Many organizations miss the participation principle and look at social media as another channel for corporate communications rather than an opportunity for mass collaboration. Instead, Gartner recommends that business leadership set active participation as a priority design goal, with everything else revolving around getting the community to contribute valuable content. Providing seed content to promote community contributions, and motivating content contribution through social incentive mechanisms — such as social status and gamification — are recommended to drive participation.

Collective: People Must Swarm to the Effort

With social media, participants "collect" around a unifying cause. People go to the content to contribute their piece to the whole. However, the most challenging effort with social media is to gain community adoption, and speed is critical. Swarming is almost completely dependent on the organization’s purpose for mass collaboration. Gartner advises organizations to pursue a specific and well-defined purpose that is easily identifiable and meaningful to the target audience. It’s important to capitalize on physical world events, as well as online events, as part of a "tipping point plan" to rally people and catalyze a community.

Transparency: The Community Validates and Organizes Content

A social media solution also provides transparency, in that participants are privy to one another's participation. It is in this transparency that the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement.
Gartner recommends empowering the community with a robust capability to view, use and provide feedback on the contributions of others: with functionality such as thumbs up and thumbs down, tagging, voting, star ratings, and social commentary. Employing transparency with social status and gamification mechanisms, such as leader boards, virtual currencies and badges, also helps to create incentives and recognize valuable contributions.

Independence: Provides the "Mass" in Mass Collaboration

Independence delivers anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration, which means any participant can contribute completely independent of any other. To aid independence, Gartner advises organizations to consider the potential scale of the social media solution, and examine the design for anything that may impede anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration. They should also eliminate, or at least minimize, any workflow, controls, administration and moderating, or other gating mechanisms that can create bottlenecks and negatively impact scale.

Persistence: Contributions Must Endure for Scaled Value

Organizations should make it easy for participants to capture content using evolving technologies, such as contextual information capture, to help collect more interaction content. They should examine how much persistence is desired, how much of the contribution to capture, how to manage it and how long to maintain it, whilst identifying content that is critical to the purpose of the social media effort.

Emergence: Communities Self-Direct for Greater Productivity

The behaviors in mass collaboration cannot be modeled, designed, optimized or controlled like those in traditional systems. They emerge over time through the interactions of community members. Emergence is what allows collaborative communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

An organization should observe social media behaviors, examine how productivity actually manifests itself through community interactions, then guide the community or make other organizational behavior adjustments to accommodate new ways of working.

More information on CRM and social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com