The business impact of social, management and technology trends

This morning session by Jackie Flynn at the Gartner IT Expo on the major societal management and technical disruptive trends and its impact on organizations was a pretty interesting and useful indeed. She began by talking about the current hot trends that occupy our attention. These are, for example, F-commerce, enterprise app stores, big data, 802.11ad, gamification, group buying, cloud bursting, natural language question answering, behavioral gestural analytics, social TV, micro insurance, image recognition, personal cloud, 3-D bio printing, etc. She did a very good job of separating these disruptive trends into three major groups: societal, management, and technical.

At the outset, she talked about megatrends that are pervading these three areas. At a high-level, these are global and distributed, open and transparent, always on and instantly accessible, contextual and right sized and finally social and mobile themes. Corresponding to these megatrends were mega-capabilities that were discussed. These were in the area of capturing new info, exposing new patterns, and delivering just in time insight and access.

She looked at each of these trends from three perspectives: the factors driving the trend, the social impact and the business opportunities generated as a result.

I do not want to give you the complete discussion of each of these trends as a simply do not have the bandwidth to talk about it at length. However I will say this: businesses need to look at the information that they have and use it to identify trends way before the market does. They need to re-evaluate the role that information plays in their current corporate strategy.