Opportunities in (I.T.) Chaos

I just finished reading “The next wave of technologies” by Phil Simon. A great read! It proposes a new Enterprise 2.0 - not related to earlier Web 2.0 related definitions: IT organizations will adopt several new technologies.

• Cloud computing. No need to provide more details on this one, benefits outweigh problems.
• PCs took over 10 years to arrive to many desktops at global organizations. Many visionaries think that the mobile transformation will take less than 5 year. All agree that portable devices will be the most common way to get to what’s left of any Intranet.  “The New world of wireless” from Scott A. Snyder goes further detailing the org chart effect organizations might experience.
• Social Media, customer communities and social networks are main communication channels. However Twitter, facebook and other do not really have an enterprise product. Expect more than analytics.
• Enterprise Search and Retrieval (ESR), Master Data Management (MDM) and Enterprise Risk Management will increase relevance.
• Innovation from virtually collocated teams will continue growing.
• Great coverage of interoperability.
• Green IT will be adopted for three main reasons: cost savings, government policy and end user demand.

All the above topics under a single umbrella. Simon is only missing more comments on NUI, Augmented Reality and geo-location from my perspective to have one of the best ever compilations.

B Side. The next challenge is deeply understanding the impact the industry will live given the re-tooling of the enterprise. I hope to be wrong but most likely it will be  painful:

• Several visionaries predict that hosting companies on developed countries won’t be able to compete with industry “gorillas”
• Software as a services eliminates a lot of “non-value” adding channels
• The IT profession will evolve to higher forms, e.g. Business Intelligence instead of installing/managing a RDBMS.

Let’s move now to the real Enterprise 2.0 era and the ecosystem for the next decade.