Apparently one of the latest acronyms/buzzwords in ICT is ‘SMAC’, now being touted by the on-the-curve ‘commentariat’, ‘analyticists’ and well-known market research outfits that should have better taste. It stands for Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud. In other words, an assortment of leading current trends contrived into a phonetically ambiguous acronym. Why not CAMS, for example, giving a bit of primacy to Cloud? MACS would suggest some influence from one of the new Grey Empires aiming for world i-domination, so that’s probably out. The wittiest one is probably not acceptable to the lofty pundits, but SCAM has a certain ring to it in the context.
Yes, those four represent visible current trends across ICT. But they are not much help in looking for categorisation or strategically informative insights since they cut across devices, architecture and infrastructure, advanced software and what the kids are doing with their comms toys these days. All of the major voices in technology forecasting like Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, Gartner and IDG and others share these topics (and have the good taste to avoid that SMAC shorthand). But in many respects the real or at least the practical questions are about exactly how these elements of 21st century ICT will impact on enterprise technology adoption and change-and perhaps even culture-in 2013 and beyond.
Mobility fun
Mobility is certainly a desirable characteristic of any element of ICT in business as in just having fun. But since we have become accustomed to ‘anywhere, anytime’ as a tech mantra for more than a decade, it is not very enlightening on its own.
At the same time, cloud and mobility are structural, in fairness, and specific aspects and attributes can be harnessed by any type of enterprise to fulfil objectives like efficiency, customer satisfaction or plain old cost savings. Now that wireless spectrum has been released and we look set to enjoy 4G from the early middle of next year, both cloud services adoption and mobile access to anything look bound to gain a significant impetus. There will be opportunities for users and services that were just not possible at 3G dongle speed, if only from pent-up demand for more bandwidth for any mobile device to fulfil its potential.
One immediate target category is the hard-pressed rural small and micro-business which has been stuck at a maximum (and uncommon) 7-8mb ADSL speed for the most part. Reps and proprietors on the road have found 3G mobile and broadband dongles a godsend. But it was the existence of mobile broadband that made many valuable things possible, not the performance. Teleworking is of course the business sibling of small enterprise management-working to corporate standards with very limited physical and connectivity resources. If the new 4G data tariffs allow, 2013 could be the beginning of the end of copper and (A)DSL in the final loop for any kind of business.
Device debate
Any discussion of mobility tends to be hijacked by the Device Debate, which is usually influenced by the latest gadgets. That in turn introduces the constant comparison between the walled i-Garden and its orchard or the slightly more open plains of Android. It can be hard to re-introduce the debate to what it is actually about-connectivity and content or capability anywhere anytime. To which we should often add ‘any device’. But this writer prefers the term ‘screen of choice’ because actually getting on usefully with whatever activity ‘mobility’ is supporting is often more dependent on the screen size than the device itself. Why do people now so often carry more than one portable device? Because smart phones are smashing for some things but who wants to play with spreadsheets or editing reports or presentations on a 100mm screen? Enter the tablet, with devastating consequences for the market growth forecasts of some of the most savvy analysts in the world.
Once the screen of choice is in hand for whatever someone wants to do, the back end starts to be more significant than anything else. Virtual desktop architecture and cloud start to deliver the fully functional, secure connection with home base content and enterprise systems functionality that is still by far the most effective way to work on intensive or extensive tasks. All too easily dismissed as the ‘traditional’ approach to using ICT in business, it is still the most effective for a huge proportion of work.
The multiple little tasks that are light, quick, easy and so on-which does not mean they are not important-are well served by smart phone apps and KPI dashboards and indeed by phone calls. The evangelists for smart apps tend to forget how much is accomplished every day in business by simple telephony.
Cloud forecast
Cloud is already pervasive in ICT and clearly stays in any tech forecast for at least the medium term, obscuring perhaps our glimpses of blue sky. Most of the professional forecasters are looking at 2013 as largely more of the same in terms of cloud permeation. It is certainly fairly clear that the continued growth of mobile ICT in all its manifestations untethers users from their employers, at least in the sense of traditional remote log-in in whatever form.
We have already seen that once users are working through the Web and using SaaS and smart phone apps, there are good technical and economic arguments for a great proportion of the organisation’s computing requirements to share that general cloud environment. To what extent that might or should be will depend on the specific organisation, just as much of its actual data may remain firmly earth-bound.
The cloud classification of public, private, hybrid and so on are already starting to blur-not that they were ever sharper than the underlying metaphor in the first place-in favour of descriptions that reflect the actual use more clearly. The concept of a community cloud, for example, is potentially a major category. It offers services and value in areas that are common to organisations that share a similar operating environment such as government or specific regulated industries. They have so much in common that, despite commercial competition in many cases, they can agree on what is worth sharing and the rules and protocols to govern it. Like traditional sectoral organisations, a community cloud can agree its own governance and elect leaders.
Personal cloud
Something similar applies to the personal cloud, which Gartner prophesied earlier this year is what will replace the PC at the centre of people’s personal digital lives, both as employees and as private individuals. For the enterprise, this is conceptually a logical step forward from virtual desktop architecture. The work applications and data and permission can be supplied to the individual’s personal cloud, logically and securely separated within that cloud from all of the owner’s other stuff and connections. In a single bound we will bypass most of the difficulties of managing multiple devices. The core challenge of security in use is at least now confined to a single and universal architecture.
Conceptually, this approach is virtualisation carried to a sort of ultimate level: it is cloud as a device, with your entire workload and corporate personality presented to your own cloud as a virtual entity. You can use it and personalise it as you would anything else on your own little cloud except that it is controlled and secured remotely by the organisation. For both user and enterprise, there can now be a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do. It is effectively ICT-as-a-Service on your screen of the moment.
Social territory
Social media is the territory that has had the general media buzzing in recent years with a high proportion of CIOs and their boards looking on in something close to horror. For the corporate mind set, it really is a dangerous jungle out there. The marketing world has, of course, plunged into social media with headlong enthusiasm-headstrong, many would say-and with no great scares or scandals it has to be said. There are very much still two strong strands of caution:
– are social media/networking users a significant or even representative slice of your target market?
-is any market territory so inchoate, ill-defined and measurement-free worth serious business investment?
As against that understandable corporate caution, the online social world is clearly a vibrant, happening place with rapid ripple response and growing masses of real people. Sounds like a marketplace, funnily enough.
It seems unlikely that the general corporate engagement with social media will move much beyond marketing in the near future. Yet there are definitely signs that consumer market enterprises are looking beyond early stage engagement, mostly in trend monitoring and market data acquisition, to direct relationships and even sales. There is certainly no way consumer market enterprises can ignore that whole online social world.
Yet the results from investment in social media monitoring tools, clearly smart and effective in many ways, have been largely disappointing. Perhaps the caution should have more to do with that well proven social phenomenon, on the Web as well as in fashionable night clubs, that the in-crowd invariably moves on to something else when yesterday’s delight becomes common and commercial.
Central question
Business Analytics is, without question, front and centre in any emerging technology scenario. Forget Big Data. Giant data stores are for mandatory archives and libraries and 21st century virtual museums (content repositories) unless they are capable of being mined for trend information and usable insights. In that context, Big Data is a tech subset of applied analytics in everything from astronomy to retail shopping behaviour.
The salient point is that the development of analytics software and its Business Intelligence tools as well as deep data mining capabilities has permeated most strands of financial and ERP solutions, CRM and even manufacturing and supply chain management applications. Any day now we can expect ‘Bookkeeping for Beginners: with BI’. Which is facetious, but in fact ‘Analytics-as-a-Service’ is already with us as a cloud service.
So, quite literally, every layer and type of management can expect to be serviced by better, smarter, pre-digested information. It is where we are already seeing the emergence of a new multi-skilled role in data science. Does that mean the decision making will become easier across the board? Over to the IMI and Harvard and the business academics, but the melancholy suspicion lingers that the bar has simply been raised. This has to be a good thing, at least in the sense that business analytics is very likely the best example so far of a natively compute-based application as opposed to the computerisation of traditional business administration functions and tasks.
The right hand assistant of analytics, and not just in the BI kindergarten, is data visualisation. The machines and the algorithms do the work (or at least we trust them to do so) but we humans like to understand and colour visualisation is enormously helpful in that process. As analytics becomes an ever more pervasive part of our business systems, watch out for 3D in screen and projection visualisation. Technically now very good but still largely a visual technology in search of content, 3D is a good bet to claim a place in at least this one niche in the business world.
Holy grail
Now that analytics is a mainstream software genre, of course, we cannot stand still. Predictive analytics sounds like the Holy Grail for business leaders but in truth we are really talking about probability analysis. ‘Forward analytics’ is a useful term and its value is genuine and already well proven in many sectors such as retailing and financial services. Closely related and also surely destined to become a definitive way of doing things is embedded or in-line analytics. Typically applied to online betting or credit and fraud risk analysis in financial services, this is a key area where the sheer speed of in-memory analytics processing has gained market share rapidly. With the falling costs of RAM and solid state data storage allied to multi-core high speed computing, this type of intelligent system is clearly heading for the applications mainstream.
The continuing development of business applied analytics will include next generation analytics, according to Gartner. Next year we should see the serious beginning of inter-organisational analytics, along the supply chain or in communities of organisations with shared activity environments. Commercial competitors can at the same time collaborate in market and other analysis for the purposes of market development or common process improvement, for example. Collaborative analysis could be between direct business partners or as a shared sector service along the lines of, for example, the New York Stock Exchange cloud environment for financial services.
Somewhere in here also is perhaps where more value can be extracted from online social media. Since almost all such activity is by definition global and visible, there is plenty of scope for collaboration in monitoring and analysing behaviour and trends in that online world. In fact it is hardly much different from traditional market research and specific trade market monitoring. Like any marketplace, understanding the crowd patterns and the habits and the different types of consumer is important and valuable. But competing still means offering the right product at the right time and the right price to the right punter.
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