Eight Business-Tech Trends to Watch
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The strategic CIO knows how to exploit technology to achieve strategic business benefits. Consultants from McKinsey & Co. have identified eight-technology-enabled business trends that creative IT and business leaders should exploit to mold their business strategies over the next decade. |
McKinsey grouped the eight trends within areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets and leveraging information in new ways. They include:
Managing Relationships
1. Distributing co-creation that furnishes companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.
2. Using consumers as innovators by exploiting Web 2.0 technologies to tap a new mood among consumers to engage online with organizations of all kinds.
3. Tapping into a world of talent that allows companies to outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work—such as finance, marketing, IT and operations—while still maintain organizational coherence.
4. Extracting more value from interactions through tools that promote tacit collaboration, including wikis, virtual team environments and videoconferencing.
Managing Capital and Assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation by interconnecting existing automated systems through common standards. This information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, such as inventory management and customer service.
6. Unbundling production from delivery by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring the use of each and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments.
Leveraging Information In New Ways
7. Putting more science into management to help managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop insights that create competitive advantage and new business models. Ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.
8. Making business from information by capturing accumulated pools of data in numerous systems to serve as the raw materials for new, information-based business opportunities.
