Cloud, social, mobility and an explosion in information were pointed by Gartner as the new nexus of forces that are creating a necessity to look different to the business. The trends identified by consultant firm drive companies to re-invent themselves to become more focused on post-modern business, creative destruction, and simplicity.
This is the era of mass collaboration driven by the consumerization of IT. “IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships where the customer is everywhere, and so must your business; a world fuelled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and mobility, enabled by the cloud,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research.
During the opening of Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held in São Paulo in October 25- 27, consultant firm highlighted that these four forces are powerful enough to change companies roles, and that the impact of them makes recent IT architecture obsolete.According to institution, two thirds of CEO’s believe that IT will make a greater contribution in this decade. However, CIO must pay attention on changes driven by four pillars of cloud, social, mobile and information. “It is a huge opportunity because they are changing companies all over the world, creating a new economy, a new environment,” told Sondergaard.
One of the key component is mobile, mostly driven by consumerization. Besides, since last year, the installed base of mobile PCs and smartphones exceeded that of desktop PCs. Gartner predicts an incredible increase on media tablets sales, jumping from 18 million sold in 2010 to 918 million by 2016 – it would be one for every eight people on earth. “They will be in the hands of your customers and employees,” said Sondergaard.
Gartner also pointed that, by 2014, the installed base of devices based on lightweight mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based systems. “Companies will have to re-image the way they provide application.”
Indeed, during the presentation, the senior VP, showed that, by 2014, private app stores will be deployed by 60% of IT organizations. “The applications themselves will be redesigned – they will become context-enabled, understanding the user’s intent automatically. Mobile computing is not just the desktop on a handheld device. The future of mobile computing is context-aware computing.”
The cloud concept combines the industrialization of IT capabilities and the disruptive impact of new IT-led business models. However, Gartner pointed that the shift away from traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still in the very early stages. But it is growing five time faster compared to overall, which is 19% annually through 2015.
Companies also must to incorporate social software capabilities throughout their enterprise systems, highlighted Sondergaard, during the keynote speaker lecture. The next stage of social computing is about mass-customer, mass-citizen, and mass-employee involvement with enterprise systems.
The information pillar is related to the concept of big data, due to an unprecedented amount of information of enormous variety and complexity, which is changing the data management strategies. “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine,” Sondergaard said. This creates what Gartner calls a Pattern-Based Strategy architecture. An architecture that seeks signals, models them for their impact, and then adapt to the business process of the organization.
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