Accenture Technology Vision 2012: What It Means for Communications

Accenture looks at the major trends driving technology over the coming three to five years—as outlined in the Accenture Technology Vision 2012—and relates them to the communications industry. We explore how six technology trends will influence communications over the next three to five years. Communications companies in pursuit of high performance will be developing strategies based on these trends, and how they intersect with industry drivers, now.

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Accenture’s annual Technology Vision report provides a perspective on the future of technology beyond the current conversations about the cloud, mobility, and big data. This year’s report—Technology Vision 2012—outlines the trends that forward-thinking CIOs will use to position their organizations to help drive growth, rather than focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

These trends are:

• Context-based services
• Converging data architectures
• Industrialized data services
• Social-driven IT
• Platform as a service-enabled agility
• Orchestrated analytical security

Read the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 for more about these trends in general.

Accenture looks at how forward-looking communications industry CIOs can use these trends to drive competitive advantage:

• Context-based services will fuel growth. The new high ground for data services is in the kaleidoscope of customer context that can add up to rich customer experiences.

• Embrace—and prepare for—big data. As communications companies diversify services (for example, combining 2G, 3G and LTE in the same networks), partner with content providers, and search for insights from social media, they will have to manage structured and unstructured data from diverse sources to create a single view of the customer.

• Data management needs to be industrialized. As the communications industry moves toward collaboration with partners in adjacent markets (for example, entertainment, education, banking, retail and energy), communications companies must establish interfaces with partners and translate internally and externally sourced information to support effective decision-making.

• Connect with customers through social media. In both emerging and developed markets, social media use is exploding: email is yielding to Twitter “tweets,” Facebook “likes,” RSS feeds, and instant messaging. Social platforms are driving consumers to websites where they expect 24/7 access to information and community.

• PaaS drives new niche services. Virtualization has helped communication companies reduce costs and improve efficiencies internally, but they must now use PaaS to offer managed hosted services to clients.

• New opportunities bring daunting security threats. As communications companies expand relationships with content providers and partners—while also boosting their own social media presence—they face daunting security threats across an ever-growing number of internal and external sources of attack.

To achieve strategic advantage, CIOs will need to align communications industry trends with key technology trends. They must take action now to begin the journey together with their business colleagues.

The collaboration demands detailed discussions with C-suite. It will call for CIOs to internalize the key technology trends so that they can start framing these discussions—talking not about the techniques themselves but about the impact they will have on the business and the new initiatives they can drive.

Accenture has identified four action items for communications industry CIOs:

• Prioritize the technology trends. Consider Accenture’s suggested actions for embracing each trend over a 12-month time frame.

• Significantly strengthen analytical capabilities. Communications companies will have to enrich their customer profiles with external data, process this information using advanced analytical capabilities, and distribute sales leads through all relevant channels.

• Adopt highly agile and decoupled business and applications architectures. Communications companies will have to develop new third-party partnerships to obtain external data for their customers.

• Know the limits with regards to privacy and customers’ personal space. They will risk losing their customers’ trust and incurring possible privacy lawsuits if they become too explicit with their offerings based on newly acquired customer context information from private sources.