Mobility, cloud, analytics to reshape IT in 2012

Research firm IDC is more bullish, estimating that worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9% year over year to $1.8 trillion in 2012. A healthy chunk of spending -- as much as 20%, IDC says -- will be driven by a handful of technologies that are reshaping the IT industry: smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking and big data analytics.

Mobility is introducing significant management and security headaches for IT, while together enabling the business to increase employee productivity and improve customer service. Social networking is spawning a treasure trove of customer data, however also creating an enormous challenge for companies that want to make any sense of all that data.

The technical challenges

As companies try to balance the technical challenges and opportunities, they're as well grappling with a shortage of skilled professionals. IT pros with application development, virtualization or cloud computing skills are all things considered supply, as are those with business analytics expertise.

On the project front, Cars.com is planning a handful of major projects in 2012, including reengineering its CRM and fulfillment systems, deploying a new data warehouse platform, and rolling out new business intelligence technologies.

Increasing market expectation with our clients

"There's an increasing market expectation with our clients, especially car dealers, that they can log into a tool and see real-time metrics. Our current data warehouse architecture requires an overnight batch process, and we want to load uninterruptedly throughout the day," Swislow says. "On the business intelligence layer, we're looking to greatly upgrade our visualization and dashboard capabilities, both for internal use and for customer-facing reporting."

A key project for 2012 will be to extend a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) rollout. Ridgeland analyzed its VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) options for several years previously starting to deploy the research at city hall and the police department. Beginning in January, more city departments, including the fire department, will be brought on board.

The city of Ridgeland is replacing IT staff who leave

The city of Ridgeland is replacing IT staff who leave, however it's not adding new positions. Nucleus Technology says it's seeing more of that: IT departments putting money into technology to put it more exactly than more personnel. Among the ROI-driven case studies Nucleus published in 2011, 60% said they were able to reduce or avoid adding staff as a benefit of innovation investments.

"With uncertainty about what corporate taxes are going to look like in 2012, and what unemployment is going to look like, companies are opting to invest in innovation that makes their existing employees more productive," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of technology at the firm.

Companies have continued to spend on CRM, even while the recession, because it's important for businesses to know their clients -- to be able to identify and retain the clients who generate profit for the company, to cut loose the ones who don't, and to track new clients who are willing to spend, Wettemann says. "For every dollar you spend on CRM, you get $5.60 back."

Analytics innovation is hot because it enables businesses to make decisions based on data instead of gut, and it doesn't require an enormous IT outlay. "We've seen companies make a relatively small investment, do a pilot analytics project, understand how the innovation works, and see what it delivers in terms of returns," Wettemann says.

Cloud computing is another area of accelerated growth as 2012 gets underway. The shift from traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is on the whole in the early stages nevertheless growing at much faster rate than overall enterprise IT spending, according to Gartner.

The meteoric adoption of the mobile devices

Two complementary trends -- the meteoric adoption of the mobile devices and the increasing use of personal smartphones and tablets for business purposes -- are furthermore disrupting the IT status quo and driving new investments.

Enterprises are grappling with how to incorporate employees' mobile devices into existing corporate innovation infrastructures. The city of Ridgeland, Miss., is so far prohibiting employees from using personal devices to access internal systems. Limited personnel is one reason, Kirchner says, along with the management and security challenges that employee-owned devices introduce.

Sales and marketing teams want to engage clients through social networking sites, end users want to access personal accounts from the workplace, and HR wants to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees. Nevertheless IT doesn't want to expose the company to unnecessary risk.

The big picture

In the big picture, enterprises aren't waiting around for the economy to improve. IT executives are spending in new areas and dramatically rethinking how they acquire research and deliver services to end users. Afterwards a period of unrelenting focus on cost-cutting, these course adjustments are a breath of fresh air.