Value is in IT convergence

Businesses looking to differentiate from competitors should look into where trends just as big data and analytics, connected mobile devices and cloud computing intersect to gain competitive value, notes analyst.

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SINGAPORE--It is at the intersection of three emerging ICT trends that companies can find both direction and differentiation to boost their businesses, an IDC analyst pointed out.

Crawford Del Prete, executive vice president of worldwide innovation products and chief technology officer at IDC, identified three macro-level ICT trends --big data and analytics, connected mobile devices and cloud computing--as vital for businesses' future growth. The analyst was in town for the innovation firm's Asia-Pacific Directions 2011 conference held here Thursday.

Elaborating, the analyst said that the amount of data consumed is driving the growth of big data and analytics. To illustrate, 14 petabytes of content were created in 2010 from data-intensive social networking platforms just as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Comparatively, data consumption reached 10,003 petabytes while the same time period, Del Prete noted.

Del Prete pointed out that as data continues to grow unabated, there is "no reason" why analytics should not be in demand. "Somebody has to analyze [all that] monstrous amount of unstructured data [to create business insight and value]," he said.

Devices just as smartphones and tablets, which the analyst described as the "changing face of computers", are "just the start". Del Prete said that services, platforms, mobile applications and networks will mature in the course of time to become part of the overall roadmap to improving a business's mobility and productivity.

Cloud computing, which is the third trend, will complement the move toward better business processes and improve collaboration between end-users to boost overall internal IT efficiency, he added.

Aligning IT to business needs Del Prete was not the only one who saw value in meshing up emerging IT trend either. Fellow keynote speaker, Cort Isernhagen, vice president at IDC Insights International, said the transformation, or reengineering, of business processes will take place where IT and processes meet.

He pointed out that technology just as social analytics enables data collection at the point of creation to provide "real-time intelligence" and speed up decision-making. This creates "new business-IT conversations" as compared to traditional ones where it was more a "transaction workflow", he added.

The importance of the business-IT conversation

Isernhagen noted the importance of the business-IT conversation, since CIOs and IT heads all in all face difficulties in aligning IT goals with "business justification". This accordingly makes it a challenge for the CIO to articulate and "internally sell" IT investments and expenditure to their non-IT counterparts.

He advised that IT heads need to relook the company's business by processes and workflows, instead of seeing it as siloed, task-oriented departments, to find opportunities to create efficiencies in completing assignments and being competitive with IT.

For example, Isernhagen recommended that IT professionals pitch solutions and investments that consider the needs of the non-IT stakeholders of any particular process and sub-processes, earlier offering up the research platforms that would be involved to support the solution.

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