Roundtable Discussion: Impact of Major Technology Trends

January 24th, 2012

This fall we celebrated our 10th anniversary of the Roundtable on Digital Strategies and the fifth anniversary of its European chapter. Fittingly, we brought members of the European chapter together with members of the Americas chapter in a discussion about the mega-trends in technology and how they are affecting corporate information technology groups, their business models and vendors/partners in the technology industry. The group included CIOs from American Express, Bechtel, Chevron, Eastman Chemical, Eaton Corporation, Hilti Corporation, Holcim, Nestlé, Sysco, and Time Warner Cable, as well as senior executives from CompuWare, the Dachis Group, Dell|KACE, and ViON.
We discussed five overarching trends that we agreed were defining the current wave of technologies:

The consumerization of information technology
Cloud computing
Mobility
Social media
Big data

Some in the group saw the consumerization of information technology as an overarching trend, with all the rest as subsets or derivatives thereof, while others defined consumerization more narrowly as “bring your own device” (BYOD) or the influence of consumer applications on the enterprise.
The majority of the group felt that the trend towards mobility was having the biggest impact today and was fundamentally changing the nature of work. And most agreed that it was the “big data” trend that was the least mature and would bring the most future impact. The consensus was that, despite what many of us might consider to be a lot of data available currently, we have not seen anything yet: the volumes of data in the future from sensors, location technology, machine-to-machine communications, measurement devices, and technology embedded in products will bring orders of magnitude more data yet. Interestingly, cloud computing emerged as viewed as the last impactful of the five trends.
We will soon publish the overview from this roundtable, so stay tuned. You can also see an analysis of these five trends that one of the participants, Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group, did on his blog on ZDNet.