Four pivotal information technologies are rapidly reshaping how enterprises operate: mobile technology, analytics, cloud computing and social business. The magnitude and speed of these shifts is staggering. By the end of 2012, mobile devices are expected to outnumber people. Sources of analytical insight continue to multiply, with the world generating 15 petabytes of new data every day — roughly eight times the information housed in all the academic libraries in the United States.
Pundits now debate when — not if — the use of cloud computing will surpass traditional on-premise IT infrastructure. And nearly 1.5 billion people use social networks on a regular basis, with the most recent billion joining in since 2009. With so many shifts occurring at once, it’s not surprising that CEOs rank skills as the number-two driver impacting their organizations.
This year, the IBM Center for Applied Insights surveyed more than 1,200 IT and business decision makers who are determining when, where and how their organizations adopt mobile, analytics, cloud and social technologies.
Nearly two-thirds indicate these technologies are strategically important to their enterprises. However, being an ardent believer in their game-changing potential isn’t enough. Organizations face sizable adoption hurdles — severe skill shortages and pervasive security concerns.
Despite the challenges, a group of Pacesetters is out ahead, positioning their enterprises to innovate, differentiate and better understand and serve customers — by capitalizing on these four emerging technologies.
Given the current trajectory, it’s easy to imagine a world where customers purchase more through mobile devices than computers, where analytics drive the majority of real-time decision making, where cloud becomes the predominant IT delivery mechanism and where more ideas emerge from social networks than from R&D labs. Pacesetters are preparing for such realities.
