The digital enterprise

In the future, companies that think digitally and use available, promising technologies to open up new business models and business areas will be successful. Because technology has become the core of almost all parts of a company today. This means that all companies are in the process of becoming digital companies.

SevenIT Trends

to become. That's why the entire board - not just the CIO - must understand, internalize and help shape the impact of new technologies on existing business models. This is the summary of the study "Technology Vision 2013", for which the management consulting, technology and outsourcing service provider Accenture identified seven IT trends that companies should take advantage of now:

1. de-anonymize digital relationships

All the contact and interaction with the end consumer has led to an unprecedented amount of data. Companies still need to address the individual customer. This can only be done by combining personalized and contextual information.

Example: Meat Pack, a shoe retailer from Guatemala, operates with a mobile app that locates the user. When a customer enters the competitor's store, Meat Pack sends him a message about its own current special offers on the mobile device.

2. data in the supply chain

Nowadays, enterprise applications are developed for specific tasks. They therefore also only process a selected number of data. In the future, it will be a matter of understanding the processing of data more as a kind of supply chain. It will no longer be about solving individual problems, but about fundamental issues that underlie these problems.

Business intelligence (BI) solutions and analytics tools need to relate more and more data: Through sensors, through tools embedded in products, and through social networks, companies are constantly receiving new information. Managing Big Data means not only processing this information, but also using analytics tools to turn it into predictions about future buyer behavior and new sales markets.

3. give the data legs

Driven by the "three big Vs", namely Volume, Variety and now Velocity, data must be acquired and processed ever faster. In-memory computing and visual data processing support companies in this process.

4. seamless cooperation

Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Google+ have fundamentally changed communication habits. Companies can benefit from corresponding applications. Social media tools such as Yammer or Chatter, for example, help to stem the tide of e-mail and thus increase productivity. Most employees have long since internalized the new social forms of communication. It's time to adapt business processes accordingly. Every app that a company uses must be "social".

5. software-defined networking

Software-defined networks are supposed to make companies faster and more agile. Behind this is a development that should lead away from proprietary hardware and towards a freely configurable infrastructure.

When software and hardware are decoupled, new applications no longer need to understand the internal interaction of routers and switches. This makes it easier for companies to implement changes.

6. get to the honeypot

Security remains a key issue. Companies have a duty to be more active. The motto is "active defense". In concrete terms, it is not enough to fend off attacks; companies must understand the attackers' approach and then take action themselves.

One example of this are so-called honeypots. These are designed to be attacked by hackers and analyze the method of attack. They thus also function as intrusion detection systems. In order to improve authentication methods, it will be advisable to develop user profiles in the future. Likewise, companies should collect and process information about the attackers ("hacker fingerprinting").

7. switch between the clouds and the worlds

It is no longer a question of whether the cloud will be used, but how. In the future, IT bosses will have to decide which content is in a private cloud and which is allowed in the public cloud. They will be operating in a hybrid world. As for IT teams, CIOs will need to find architects to oversee and guide the interplay of capabilities and functions. As-a-service models are taking off. Cloud computing is changing not just IT, but the entire business world. One example: a marketing campaign that carmaker BMW launched together with Microsoft in Panama and Argentina. New car models were to be publicized via Facebook, and BMW used cloud-based social marketing tools from Microsoft for this purpose.

BMW, Microsoft and its partner Huddle Group developed a bilingual (English and Spanish) interactive advertising campaign. Consumers could view photos and videos of the BMW 1 Series on the Facebook page - without being logged into Facebook. The content was hosted and managed by BMW's customer loyalty system, and the data was stored in the Microsoft SQL database. Within two months, 90,000 users had taken part in the campaign and submitted data - without any major investment.

IT competence is a matter for the boss

nents. An example of how the cloud enables new business models beyond the IT department.

The CEO needs a "digital vision

The digitalization of the business world has now taken on immense proportions. "Sooner or later, every company will have to deal with the impact of digitalization on its own business model," says Michel Stofer, Managing Director at Accenture. "There needs to be a digital vision from customer engagement through smart products, through the supply chain to service and the way data becomes decision-relevant information in the company."

Michel Stofer sees changes less in terms of new technologies, but rather in the use of technologies that have already been developed: "The business side in companies already understands how strongly the world is IT-driven today - whereby IT-driven primarily means that people and data are networked. This also touches on the interaction between CIO and business departments, or the role of the IT manager. "I bet that in ten years there will be a two-tier society among CIOs: the highly strategic innovative manager and the regimented IT administrator," says Michel Stofer. "In a part of the companies, the CIO will continue to play the role of an IT administrator. Only a part will manage to position the CIO as a strategic head without any ifs and buts. What is crucial and differentiating is that the best companies develop a 'digital vision': the digital enterprise with digital customer engagement, digital supply chain and digital business intelligence, based on coherent data and equipped with sophisticated analytics." Michel Stofer continues, "I think that CEOs who delegate this task to the second or third tier are the first to lose touch with the digital revolution. In the future, IT competence will be a matter for the boss."