8 Business Technology Trends To Watch

McKinsey Quarterly:

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create
real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.
Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled
trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years.

1. Distributing co-creation. The Internet and related technologies give companies
radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate
boundaries.
2. Using consumers as innovators. Consumers also co-create with
companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a
service or product created by its distributed customers.
3. Tapping into a
world of talent. As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively
online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can
outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain
organizational coherence.
4. Extracting more value from interactions.
Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their
production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or
simple rule-based (transactional) activities.

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What's more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

6. Unbundling production from delivery
Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever smaller increments cost-effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

7. Putting more science into management
Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From "ideagoras" (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

8. Making businesses from information
Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

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