Gartner released their predictions on top 10 strategic technologies 2010 in late October.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613

Unsurprisingly Cloud Computing and Predictive Analytics top the list. CIO's should be factoring these technologies and some of the other on the list into their strategic plans for 2010.

Below is an excerpt from the list:

"Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.

Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.

Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.

IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.

Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.

Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.

Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server. This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.

However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible. 

The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single “dial” that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed. Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.

Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding. It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.

“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

Psychologist Karl Weick tells a well known story about Hungarian soldiers lost in the Apls to explain his contention that in a crises, leaders need to act in order to think. This has come to be known as enactment.
This theory is discussed with regard to the current environment in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbreditors/2009/01/leap_while_you_look_moving_for.html

Weick offered a practical example of his theory. Some Hungarian troops who got lost in the Alps wandered around aimlessly until one of the soldiers found a map in his pocket. The platoon found their way to safety, only to learn that the map they used was, in fact, a map of the Pyrenees. "I just love that story," Weick laughed, "because it illustrates that when you're confused, almost any old strategic plan can help you discover what's going on and what should be done next. In crises especially, leaders have to act in order to think - and not the other way around."

Would people agree?

A very useful section of the CIO website for those needing a refresher course on crucial IT topics:

http://www.cio.com.au/section/quick_introductions_to_technology_topics

Quick Introductions to Technology Topics Sometimes we all can use a refresher course -- or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.

The latest addition to CIO magazine's Web site, CIO's Quick Introductions to Technology Topics, gives you and your counterparts a jumpstart on the fundamentals behind a variety of hot IT topics.

Presented in a easy-to-digest FAQ format designed to save time for busy IT executives, the articles in CIO's Technology 101 series provide you with the insight you need to get the facts behind the latest industry trends and buzzwords.

Discover hints and tips across a variety of topics including the benefits of Virtualisation, how Web 2.0 can fit into your enterprise and much, much more!

 

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We are now putting clients through the online business improvement course to enable them to adapt these Mindshop tools to other areas of their business. This course provides the structure to learn many of the Mindshop tools we use at your own pace. With video explanations, interactive work areas and downloadable tools this course provides you with the skills and knowledge to drive business improvement across your organisation.

More information on our site


Download the Flyer:

Business Improvement Online Training Flyer (516 KB)

Interesting article from http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-253959.html written by Tom Inman of IBM

Commentary--As the CIO of a flourishing business, you are happy to report that current information projects are going well. The new call center is up and running, the new data warehouse is online, and the new customer loyalty systems have been deployed successfully.

Things seem to be going well until the CEO asks, “Who are our most profitable customers across the business and which channels do they prefer?” Although the new systems have a lot of information – often across different parts of the business, they cannot immediately produce the requested information. The information the CEO needs will take time and effort to extract and may delay other projects. Your information projects, each successful in their own right, haven’t created the ability to respond to this question rapidly. Worse, the CEO will only ask more questions like this in the future, so he or she can address new and business opportunities.

You realize that you need a more unified approach to leverage the information you already have. You need an Information Agenda.

Take the example of Irish Life and Permanent (IL&P), a leading provider of financial services in the Irish market. The company faced the challenge of integrating several acquired businesses into its portfolio and expanding its growth in a market in which it already had leadership. To help improve its business performance, the company decided to make a strategic shift away from a product focus to a growth-based focus on customer service and loyalty. Among the first steps it took was to establish a “Customer Data Council,” which brought business and IT leaders together from across its various operating units, to define a common vocabulary, and create a roadmap to align the delivery of information to business strategy across the enterprise. IL&P created an Information Agenda to define how best to use company information to service clients and create new business opportunities.

What is an "Information Agenda"?
Today’s business leaders find themselves stuck between intensifying business challenges on the one hand, and information management systems on the other hand which simply limit their ability to respond. Businesses are faced with increased competition for an ever more empowered set of customers, while simultaneously responding to an intensifying regulatory environment, and an accelerating pace of globalization. They need to achieve information agility, where they are able to leverage trusted information as a strategic asset for sustained competitive advantage. The most successful companies are developing an Information Agenda to do just that.

An Information Agenda is an approach for transforming information into a trusted source that can be leveraged across applications, processes and decisions for sustained competitive advantage. It allows organizations to achieve the information agility that permits sustained competitive advantage by accelerating the pace at which customers can begin managing information independent of applications or business processes.

If you have lived the last three decades of technology evolution, it is ironic that despite the word "Information" being used in terms such as Management Information Systems (MIS) and Information Technology, the focus has been on automation of business processes via software applications, which one could define as an “application agenda.” While investments in automation through the broad deployment of packaged applications delivered competitive advantage in the short term, it was not sustainable. For example, retailers who have implemented one of the big supply chain automation applications, run the risk of erasing any short term advantage. Forward thinking leaders have moved beyond investments in automation through an application agenda, to investments in business innovation and optimization based on the delivery of trusted information, independent of applications and business process, across the enterprise.

These companies are transforming their organization into an Information Based Enterprise – an enterprise that has the flexibility to rapidly deliver information as needed to optimize processes and business decisions so that companies can quickly respond to market conditions. They are now focused on the Information Agenda.

Transforming your business to an information-based enterprise
Transformation to an Information Based Enterprise doesn’t imply the replacement of existing systems and information sources. It requires only that those systems are able to expose insightful information in with speed and flexibility. Making this transformation can seem like a daunting task and it is often difficult to know where to start. However, with the right tools, the right processes, and the right environment, creating an Information Agenda is straightforward.

The key to building an Information Agenda is to bridge the gap between the information demanders in your enterprise, and the information suppliers; between the LOB executives who are facing enormous business challenges, and the IT execs responsible for providing the information they need to succeed. Like in the IL&P example, it is critical to success to get these leaders together, to start a conversation and get a common understanding of business strategy, vocabulary and semantics. To facilitate and capture this conversation, you’ll need an open standards-based set of tools that:

• Help you identify which information is important to your organization;
• Create a common set of vocabulary to define this information for use across the enterprise
• Allow you to make information available to the people and applications that need it;
• Assist you in managing your information;
• Help you create governance practices and processes that are needed to put an information management plan into action.

The most successful companies have walked through a four step process which can serve as a best practices guide for creating an Information Agenda to turn your organization into an Information Based Enterprise:

• Uncover hidden information - Information Management is at the same inflection point that applications were about twenty years ago. A multitude of local information projects like data warehouses, data marts, business intelligence and master data management often located across many different parts of the business – in the case of IL&P across different acquired companies – have been created with little information consistency. New requests for information cannot be delivered with speed and flexibility. To begin creating an Information Agenda, you must use analysis tools to discover what data you have in these disparate systems , and connect the pieces in a meaningful way, That allows you to comprehensively view information across your organization.

Through business and IT collaboration, IL&P was able to identify common customers between its acquired companies and then begin planning how to eliminate and consolidate these redundancies for more efficient access to information.

• Create your information agenda - Now that you have a view of what data exists across your enterprise, you will be able to rationalize any inconsistencies. The set of tools you chose at the beginning will help you automate much of this step, accelerating the process. You will then be able to plan a course of action, based on business priorities, outlining the steps you need to take to address future business needs rapidly. This allows you to plot a roadmap for your Information Infrastructure.

Business priorities can range from mastering product information to connecting customer information from multiple acquisitions. Business executives and IT will work together to create a project roadmap to address these business goals. The roadmap becomes the set of information intensive projects aligned with business strategy designed to deliver short term and long term ROI. In the case of IL&P, the company wanted to reuse customer information to provide integrated experience to common customers on their Web site and in call centers.

• Build your information infrastructure - This is the step in which you bring your plan into action. To do this you must understand what specific business issues exist in your unique situation and then find the right set of industry accelerators (Industry Guides, Models, Software applications) to speed your implementation. The base of your infrastructure will be tools such as a Master Data Management, Business Intelligence, Content Management or Data Warehousing assets. —

Choosing and tailoring the key tasks according to your industry will keep the transformation focused and efficient. Going back to the example of IL&P, by starting with a series of incremental projects, each that addressed its Information Agenda, the company moved toward a single view of all its customer information. As a result, it can now tailor products and services for clients across multiple touch points such as the Internet, call-centers and various sales channels; create more effective targeted sales campaigns; improve customer self-service; and maintain continuous records of customer transactions and service satisfaction across the business.

• Maintain and constantly improve your success – Now that you have achieved your goal of a flexible Information Agenda, you have to figure out a system to expand your success to sustain the competitive advantage you created in the above steps. As such, you will need to bring together the right people, skills, processes and technology to create an Information Competency Center. The Competency Center fosters continuous learning and improvement on your Information Agenda. Any issue can be effectively addressed and your agenda can be quickly and easily modified to fit the ever-changing needs of your organization.

It is important to understand that you must govern and evaluate your work, not just at the end of your implementation, but at every step. This will help you identify and fix any inconsistencies or roadblocks as quickly as possible through construction and use of your Information Agenda. The result will be an Information Agenda tailored specifically to your business needs that will convert your organization into an information based enterprise ready to effectively and efficiently tackle new territory using your information as a strategic asset.

As we saw from IL&P, an Information Agenda can help your organization use its information to increase profitability, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency all while spurring effective communication and collaboration between business and IT executives.

The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy

An interview with Michael Porter on the 5 competitive forces that shape strategy and the update to his 1979 article.