InsightaaS: Noted IT strategist Dion Hinchcliffe, in the excellent Enterprise Irregulars blog site, has posted a list of 18 enterprise technologies to watch in 2014. Looking at enterprise IT in terms of the needs of ‘the next-generation enterprise’ – “an organization that is proactively moving into the present by changing how they assimilate, architect, apply, and maintain their technology solutions…to effectively align with and work natively in today’s networked, open, and participative digital economy” – Hinchcliffe divides the new technology into tactical vs. strategic technologies, and those with incremental and disruptive effect on adopters. He then provides a brief perspective on each of the 18, covering issues as diverse as 3D printing, IoT, integrated customer experience, wearables, and “the quantified enterprise.” Hinchcliffe closes by noting that this diffusion represents a significant adoption challenge for enterprises – but his post provides at least some initial guidance for those who want to assess a wide range of emerging enterprise technologies before prioritizing the investment of scarce resources.
Adopting new technology in the enterprise is often an uphill battle, as summoning the resources, building the skills, and managing the risk of the cutting-edge often takes as much art as it does science. But as the tech industry reaches all-time high pace of innovation amongst a truly vast sea of new choices, enterprises are becoming acutely aware they cannot let their digital gap grow too large.
Especially in competitive industries, there’s little time to worry that it’s often the pioneers that have the arrows sticking out of them. In fact, due to an array of advances from ever-more agile processes to easy-to-integrate Web services, the cost of experimenting with the latest tech is at an all-time low. Never before has it been as easy or cheap to adopt new technology, other that the fact that it takes scarce resources from IT, business analysts, users, and project management resources to deliver usable business solutions, even if the tech itself is inexpensive.
This then is one of the reasons why decentralized IT that empowers users to sensibly apply the latest tech is just one of the new techniques in the arsenal of the modern CIO.
But this doesn’t answer the most important question for technology planners getting ready for 2014: What are the most promising emerging enterprise technologies that are reaching a stage of must-adopt this year?
Read the entire post: www.enterpriseirregulars.com/72468/enterprise-technologies-watch-2014/
