<div>The post-digital era, like the post-industrial era, is the “new normal” for business and a new basis for competition, says Tech Trends 2013’ report from Deloitte. And in this era, convergence and controlled collision of five forces — analytics, mobile, social, cloud, and cyber — all newly emerged, evolving and techno-centric, are must for businesses. And what's more, business is enabling social engineering by setting up platforms that can relieve rather than serve traditional organisational constraints such as deep hierarchies, command-and-control cultures, physical proximity and resource concentration.<br /><br />As technology-centric forces drive business innovation, CIOs will emerge as catalysts in the post digital world across the executive suite, helping others understand the boundaries of the possible, forcing others to think beyond existing solutions and processes and for realising transformation. While some have predicted the slow demise of the CIO with IT managed as a distributed function across the business, Deloitte predicts the opposite. CIOs will likely not only become omnipresent on executive committees, but also become consigliore to CEOs.<br /><br />There has likely never been more potential for the CIO to shape business performance and competitive stance. IT departments that aren’t seen as reliable, efficient, and effective will likely be relegated to utility status. The CIO can lead the move to tomorrow, reshaping business as usual, and driving innovation. When CIOs catalyse the convergence of the postdigital forces, they can change the conversation from systems to capabilities and from technical issues to business impact. Plan big, start small, fail fast, scale appropriately.<br /><br />“It is an opportunity for IT to deliver extraordinary value via modest investments on top of a strong legacy technology footprint. IT can deliver engagement and empowerment to business customers, both innovating and industrialising”, says Mark White, Principal and Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP and co-author of the report.<br /><br />The Deloitte 2013 report shares ten trends grouped into two categories. Disruptors are opportunities that can create sustainable positive disruption in IT capabilities, business operations, and sometimes even business models. Enablers are technologies in which many CIOs have already invested time and effort, but which warrant another look because of new developments or opportunities. Enablers may be more evolutionary than revolutionary.<br /><br />Each of the 2013 trends is relevant today. Each has significant momentum and potential to make an impact. And each needs timely consideration. Forward-thinking organisations should consider developing an explicit strategy in each area – even if that strategy is to wait and see.<br /><br /><strong>Disruptors:</strong><br /><strong>CIO as the Post-digital Catalyst: </strong>CIOs can lead the move to tomorrow – reshaping business as usual, and driving innovation. On the one hand, they face unprecedented opportunity for innovation. On the other, the existential threat of disruption. When CIOs harness the convergence of the five postdigital forces, they can change the conversation from systems to capabilities and from technical issues to business impact. Plan big, start small, fail fast, scale appropriately.<br /><br /><strong>Mobile Only: </strong>Mobile should be top of mind for organisations. The next wave of mobile may fundamentally reshape operations, businesses and marketplaces – delivering information and services to where decisions are made and transactions occur. And the potential goes far beyond smartphones and tablets to include voice, gesture and location-based interactions; device convergence; digital identity in your pocket; and pervasive mobile computing. The very definition of mobile is changing.<br /><br /><strong>Social Re-engineering by Design: </strong>Businesses are no longer building technologies just to enable interaction – they are now engineering social platforms for specific context – platforms that can relieve rather than serve traditional organisational constraints such as deep hierarchies, command-and-control cultures, physical proximity and resource concentration. Social reengineering can fundamentally transform how work gets done, but it isn’t just a “project.” It’s a strategy.<br /><br /><strong>Design as a Discipline:</strong> Driven by consumer experience, intuitiveness and simplicity are moving from IT aspirations to enterprise mandates. Design is not a phase; it’s a way of thinking. Beyond look and feel, beyond user interfaces. Isolated in silos of user experience, marketing and product development, individual design functions may be reaching their limits. What’s needed is a collaborative, immersive environment to work together. Design is not just an “IT thing” or a “marketing thing” or a “product engineering thing.” It’s an enterprise thing.<br /><br /><strong>Internet Protocol or IPV6</strong>: Internet Protocol is the foundation of networking. Businesses need to connect with the outside world, and hence Internet Protocolv6 is for the future and the most urgent issue for today. IP addresses are woven deep into applications and infrastructure, and migration sometimes brings challenges. While there’s no drop dead date for IPv6, the final IPv4 address blocks have already been allocated. Careful and proper adoption will take time for planning, execution and verification. So the time to start is now.<br /> <br /><strong>Enablers:<br /></strong><strong>Finding the Face of Your Data: </strong>By combining human insight and intuition with machine number-crunching and visualisation, companies can answer questions they’ve never answered before. More importantly, they can discover important new questions they didn’t know they could ask.<br /><br /><strong>Gamification Goes to Work:</strong> Driving engagement by embedding gaming in day-to-day business processes. Gamification can encourage engagement and change employee, customer and supplier behavior, creating new ways to meet business objectives. The goal is to recognize and encourage behaviors that drive performance – sometimes in unlikely places. This trend has moved beyond hype and is already demonstrating business value. Gamification in the workplace incorporates social context and location services to motivate and reward desired behaviors in today’s mobile-social world.<br /><br /><strong>Reinventing the ERP Engine: </strong>Revving up data, hardware, deployment and business model architectures at the core. ERP is no stranger to reinvention, overhauling itself time and again to expand functionality. But the underlying engine has remained fairly constant. That’s now changing.<br /><br /><strong>No Such Thing as Hacker-proof:</strong> Businesses need to be more proactive and react more rapidly when breaches. The need of the hour is to detect the threats quickly, respond, clean up and adjust business tactics. Be outward-facing, prepared and ready in advance. Idea is to anticipate and prevent such lags wherever possible.<br /><br /><strong>The Business of IT: </strong> Fragmented processes and systems can prevent IT from effectively delivering on the changing demands of the business. IT may need to transform its own management systems to keep up. Today, CIOs are crafting solutions from industry-leading products and testing business cases at each step. And the potential benefits are worth the investment – not only in driving down costs and better managing risks, but in positioning IT as the business partner in provoking and harvesting disruption in the post-digital era.<br /><br />“The post-digital forces have seen extraordinary attention in the past four years – and each is still in the early stages of adoption, post-digital’s potential can spur both offensive and defensive responses. On one side lies opportunity for innovation. On the other, the existential threat of disruption. Every industry may be affected by the underlying digital forces. Every market may be reshaped by their controlled collision. Our hope is that the Tech Trends reports will help you discover the elements of post digital in your enterprise”, said Rajarshi Sengupta, Senior Director, Deloitte in India. <br /> </div>
