The consultancy firm Deloitte highlights this year's trends. Big Data progresses from being a trend to become a reality and data analysis gains strength.
Only a year ago it was difficult to find organizations that were making analytical investment at corporate level; most simply worked to implement or improve specific analytics in certain key areas.
This is changing rapidly. On the basis of analytical successes in discrete disciplines, leaders are beginning to take serious measures to create something great that is termed an Idea Driven Organization (IDO). Beyond the selective use of views to power decision-making in individual parts of the business, IDO displays a combination of strategy, people, processes and data — in addition to technology — to provide an overview of everyday life, in all parts of the organization. There is talk of "analytical processing" or "industrialized analytics" to define the new organization of companies.
Other trends highlighted by the consultancy firm
The man-machine dichotomy is fading
Are machines coming after us? It is said that intelligent machines will soon take care of our jobs. But have no fear, there is still a place for us. Humans have always added value to machines with the automation of processes, and this is likely to remain the case. Even so, the cognitive age has arrived, as indicated by the more than one billion dollars of venture capital invested in funding cognitive technologies in 2014 and 2015. Analysts expect total revenues of the market for cognitive solutions to exceed $60 billion by 2025.
Technology is evolving, but will not replace the traditional analysis capabilities that complement the process of human thought. Men-machines are not a dichotomy; it is not "either-or" but "both-and".
Of course, these combinations of man and machine will not be seamlessly formed automatically. Organizations should carry out intensive knowledge processes and determine which tasks can best be performed by machines on the one hand and humans on the other.
Cybersecurity: A good defense is not enough
The plot thickens. SuperTrend continues to grow in importance as more and more organizations are experiencing loss of value and reputation as a result of a security breach. And it's not just about data protection, product design and otherIPs are also increasingly vulnerable to theft and sabotage. Ironically, concerns about cybersecurity could delay the adoption of other trends driving innovation.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the agencies of the US federal government alone will spend over $14.5 billion on IT security in 2015, and global financial services will spend $27.4 billion on information security and fraud prevention. Organizations such as these are beginning to use more predictive approaches to threats, i.e. going on the offensive.
The Internet of Things, and also of people
Innovation has always been a key source in the transformation of companies and society. Increasingly, innovation is the result of aggregating and analyzing data to create new products and services. The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved rapidly from the kingdom of interesting gadgets to include tracking people as "things" to forming new business models — think about Uber — and influencing people. IDC estimates that the IoT market will grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion by 2020.