For CIOs, change comes with the territory, at the risk of extinction. But there are certain tech phases and innovations that IT business leaders love much more than most.
Enterprise Tablets at the Head of Mobility Trend
A big, visual part of the enterprise mobility trend is the number of tablets in the hands of end users. Forrester Research forecasts 760 million tablets in use by 2016, with one-third sold directly to businesses and many others woven into business data and processes via BYOD policies.
Big Data from a Governance Perspective
Businesses of all sizes are engaged in the possibilities with their increasing data volumes and streams. Additionally, the CIO has to consider keeping users and the data safe and useful. Consultant and author Sunil Soares said recently: Candidly, when I talk to CIO and CTO clients about big data governance, they say, great, but I am focused on governance of small data. So its early but approaching quickly. When you delve a little bit into what they are doing you find they are all dealing with big data even if they dont think of it that way.
Marketing Meetings to Come
Few business departments carry as much promise with innovative analytics and data-driven strategies than marketing. This is pushing CIOs and CMOs into working relationships on new projects, says Rich Vancil, group VP of IDC's Executive Advisory Strategies division. [W]ithout involvement from CIOs and investment by IT, marketing automation or CRM efforts can become an island of use in the marketing department, which impairs cross-functional impact of customer data, Vancil says.
Virtual Desktop Maturity
Remote, advanced monitors and software connected into a central application server hold a lot of promise for industries bogged down by a needed wave of new users and legacy system constraints. Regulatory and competitive realities in the realm of health care are one prime area for virtual desktop adoption. At Ohio Health, SVP and CIO Michael Krouse said the love of virtual desktops comes with the understanding that it will take a bit of time to update applications to run in such environments, and for vendors to offer tools that make legacy apps run in a well-orchestrated way.
Cloud Computing as a New Foundation
In discussions with CIOs and IT department leaders, Saugatuck Technology ranks the number of enterprise cloud users at 75 percent by 2016. Reflecting on last year, Saugatuck Analyst Charlie Burns writes: When we look back on 2012, its quite likely we will see it as part of a watershed/tipping-point period, in which a critical mass of user enterprises reached a beginning ability to profit considerably and knowingly from Cloud use.