Accenture Technology Vision 2013

Moving beyond transactions to digital relationships

It's time for businesses to turn their attention back to their relationships with consumers. Specifically, they need to rethink their digital strategies to move beyond e-commerce and marketing — and strive for the kinds of personal relationships that were typical years ago, between shoppers and the corner store.

The key factor is that technology is finally at a point where buyers can be treated like individuals again. Consumers are more than faceless digital transactions, more than a cookie file or a transaction history or a demographic profile; they're real people with real differences. Yet the tendency of many companies has been to use mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services to create more detailed views of consumers, consumer attributes, and transactions, rather than using the new digital connections to improve the ways in which they interact with those consumers as individuals.

Formulate the questions, and design for the answers

Companies no longer suffer from a lack of data; they suffer from a lack of the right data. As such, they have to rethink how they design software in the future, going beyond basic application functionality to "design in" ways to elicit data-rich answers that specifically answer the enterprise's key business questions.

The IT world we live in today revolves around software applications. Businesses have developed data models to support functionality; as a result, applications often don't gather data required to support new business imperatives. Most companies have also taken the next step — they recognize that information is valuable for future insight, so they capture more of it. But "more data" doesn't equal "better data." Generally, companies are capturing this data without specific questions in mind. So, when data are repurposed as inputs for strategic decisions — such as entering a new market or pricing a new service — glaring information gaps often arise.

Matching the speed of decision to the speed of action

Today, it's increasingly important to match the speed of the organization's actions to the speed of its opportunities. If too much time elapses between the acquisition of data and the ability to use the data to generate actionable insights, the organization misses out on the potential business advantage from that insight. More worrisome, if the business hasn't begun using data-driven insight to detect and evaluate opportunities in the first place, it runs real risks of falling behind.

To date, business leaders have been bombarded with statistics about the soaring volumes and incredible variety of data that they can mine for precious insights. But they need to pay attention to data velocity — the pace with which data can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in order to produce insights that managers can act on quickly. As expectations of near-instant responses become the norm, business leaders will rely heavily on higher data velocities to gain a competitive edge.

Right channel, right worker, right job

It's time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its employees work. The rise in social networking has breathed new life into collaboration. Users' new social behavior and growing expectation that every app will be "social" are pushing companies to create new user experiences. However, to increase productivity, enterprises must move beyond standalone social and collaboration channels; they must begin to directly embed such channels into their core business processes. The new approach: build social, collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.

For the most part, enterprise collaboration today is still a set of siloed communication channels, from e-mail to videoconference to social-activity streams. Users are expected to figure out by themselves how to use those channels to do their job and improve their productivity. But employees don't necessarily need to become more social for collaboration to work. The work and the process are what need to be social — and when that happens, it will transform the nature of work.

Virtualization's last mile

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a radical new way of looking at the network. In a world that demands constant change, SDN enables IT to unleash the power of virtualization and makes it easier to move to the cloud. To the business, SDN is a key technology for delivering flexibility and agility — vital components in differentiating the company. Put simply, SDN makes it easier for enterprises to handle change, and change is an imperative for a digital business.

With virtualization investments already paying off in servers and starting to pay off in storage, businesses will turn their attention to virtualizing the network in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and reap the full value of their virtualization investments. Like other virtualization technologies, SDN has the ability to radically change the flexibility with which businesses and IT operate.

With SDN, businesses can finally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise, deploying new projects quickly and determining just as

Adapting cyberdefense to the threat

When it comes to data security, cybersecurity, network security — just about any kind of corporate information security — many enterprises can do far more to address the risks that their organizations face. Though most have invested substantially in IT security, they are still not taking full advantage of the maturing tools and services available to help blunt today's attacks and plug the many entry points that skilled attackers can now exploit.

Compliance has become a comfort zone. Meanwhile, IT attack surfaces keep widening across more devices, more systems, more people, more partners, and broader infrastructure. Cloud and mobility have created new places for hackers to probe. Targeted forms of cybercrime are raising threat levels. And legacy systems that were never designed for a connected world have been brought online, opening up further weak points.

Today, IT leaders need to stay alert for the next round of security advancements. Some of the focus is shifting from studying your systems to studying the people using them. In parallel, there is

The value lies in putting the cloud to work

Cloud is no longer an emerging trend, nor is it a single concept. It can and does have a transformational impact across the business. The key question is not "should we use cloud?" but "how can we use cloud?" Leading organizations already sense that they're still only at the beginning of what they can do with cloud — and what it can do for them.

Enterprises must view cloud as an overarching approach that considers the value of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and other as-a-service technologies, and helps determine how they can best become a part of IT's current toolbox. Companies will create hybrid capabilities that combine the best of all cloud's elements, mixing on-premise and off-premise IT and integrating cloud with legacy systems and traditional software. The technology is here, so the conversations should now turn to how these tools can be used to differentiate a company's business, helping it get to market faster and respond more flexibly to opportunities and obstacles.