Rather than doing traditional analyst predictions we thought it would be a good idea to give you an infographic to mull over for the holiday season and to use as your personal travel guide on your IT voyage through 2012.
Three Destinations
We think there are three destinations that will be on your itinerary. The cloud, social and mobile.
In your journey to the cloud, IT deployment models are radically moving from a manual, scheduled, and physical orientated architecture to an automated, on-demand, and virtual architecture. At the same time the control of IT operations is moving from the customer to the supplier as is infrastructure ownership, and services responsibility. You will need to orchestrate a hybrid mix of cloud and non-cloud IT resources for some time.
On your journey to the social enterprise, you will encounter ubiquitous connectivity and customers and employees that are moving to a world that is social, mobile and open. As you are breaking down the information silos in the enterprise you will need to integrate the four stages of communications and collaboration and set your compass to the quarter that leads to a single communications and collaboration interface.
On your mobile voyage you will find out that work is not a place but an activity. The traditional firewall position that shields the enterprise network will change as the cloud network takes over. As a result, even at headquarters remote access is becoming the normal method of accessing resources. This is good news: with only one way of accessing resources, wherever you are, it should become much easier to manage access. You will also notice that the PC will not go away anytime soon. You have just too much invested in a professional PC client infrastructure. Yet your passengers will be equipped with many personal information devices that will access enterprise resources whether you like it or not.
Two Paths
There are two paths that lead to these destinations. The first path is the roadmap that is laid down and imposed by central IT. To walk this path, central IT will have to explain the advantages of high cost reduction and increased productivity compared to the advantage of each business unit, country or subsidiary having their own detailed and specific approach. Also, central IT will need to proactively work at having the transition being adopted and used by everyone.
The second path is the nature trail that is being flattened spontaneously without central guidance. Business units now buy IT resources with the same ease that Internet users are now buying an airline ticket, check in online and reserve a seat without any help of the travel department. The young generation is bringing their own IT and is using consumer technology instead of corporate IT. Social media hubs like Facebook and Google+ are taking on the role of the personal communicator, social networker, business collaborator, entertainment curator, search engine and directory.
One Strategy
There is but one overriding strategy to survive this trip and to get your passengers safely to their destination and that is to be the tour guide not the operator. IT tour operators spend 80% of their budget on keeping the lights on and only 20% on innovative projects. They run the risk that their passengers will bypass them completely and choose the nature trail. IT tour guides spend more than 20% of their budget on exploring new and innovative ways to deliver IT, guiding the itinerary for both older and younger generations
More Traveller Tips
More details about your journey and our opinions on destinations and itinerary scenarios can be found here and here. Wishing you a safe voyage and hope to hear from you soon!
P.S. Regardless which path you take on your travels you are bound to pick up lots of big data so make sure you travel with lots of bags and the appropriate tools to turn big data into big information and big profits.
