Case 2: Six Tech Trends That Will Define 2015

Nusrat EpsiMBA-535

Spring-2015

Technology is a very important stimulus for scientific advancement, driven by human curiosity, a wish to solve problems, and the desire to explore the unknown and the just possible (D. Willetts, 2012). It is well known that technology grows exponentially, but sometimes its development is unfolding right before our eyes and we dont even realize it. The assigned article pointed out six key trends that will reshape IT and the enterprise. The Internet of things moves into the mainstream. The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a powerful force for business transformation and its disruptive impact will be felt across all industries and all areas of society. According to Gartner (2014), In 2015, 4.9 billion connected things will be in use -up a massive 30% from 2014. The figure will reach 25 billion by 2020. For as an example, 2014 Google Inc., which helped to mainstream IoT with a $3.2 billion purchase of smart home thermostat maker Nest Labs. Home automation will continue to attract new attention in this year and big players will continue to pour money into smartening up everyday items. The Internet of Things is often much more efficient to process data locally and transmit only the salient data. This saves on bandwidth and transmission costs, and paves the way for the combination of massively distributed architectures with advanced analytics that creates the possibility for self-learning, thereby improving network security and performance.IT becomes more business-line-driven, and shadow IT accelerates. Information technology (IT) strategy is created to define the organization's technological infrastructure. It aims to standardize software, hardware and suppliers used in the company. Its main goal is to ensure cost-effective and the most efficient support to business users. IT organizations are at a crossroads. More technology savvy business partners, combined with compelling third-party cloud service offerings, are leading to an explosion of shadow IT. But shadow IT is coming out of the shadows, because users are not getting the business solutions they need from IT, or the experiences they prefer, in the time frame that makes a given capability valuable. Banning shadow IT spending outright is futile because it is so widespread, and undesirable because it artificially hinders novel approaches and solutions. The role of IT to frame those risks such that the business grasps the nature and extent of risk associated with adopting a particular technology. Then, together, business and IT leaders can make informed decisions about how and where specific tools fit into their overall goals and strategies.IT gets agile. IT Agility is about how IT will enable business agility, how fast IT will deliver the requirement effectively and efficiency. The more alignment between business and IT the more level of agility for both will be achieved. IT agility creates to support business processes existing IT infrastructures were never designed to process todays magnitude, complexity, or workload of data. The ability to get something quickly into the hands of the business not only builds credibility for IT, but also allows the business to determine whether the new capability adds value or not. Many businesses aspire to agility when they are burdened by brittle, tightly coupled systems constrained by rigid roadmaps and deployment schedules due to the underlying code debt, integration dependencies, and testing complexity. In the meantime, well-run technology organizations can demonstrate alignment by being responsive to tactical business opportunities to the degree possible while remaining focused on developing, communicating, and executing a longer-term strategy to enable and maintain true enterprise agility.Apps move to the center of IT. The proliferation, criticality, and interdependence of applications are all dramatically increasing. In 2014 alone, project app downloads 138 billion worldwide. Applications are no longer fixed and premise-based. Now they are in the mobile cloud, and they need to be secure and accessible from anywhere, on any device. These factors are combining to intensify the complexity of IT. One of the greatest application challenges confronting IT organizations is provisioning enterprise applications at scale. In the Fast IT model, however, time required to provision an enterprise application can decrease from months to minutes, allowing any IT organization to move at the speed of cloud. This zero-touch provisioning capability has huge implications for how companies leverage application functionality, and the rate at which innovates new and better workflows, procedures, services, experiences, decisions. Organizations get smarter about big data and analytics. The escalating volume, variety, and velocity of information that is being generated today can present businesses with many critical challenges. However, this overabundance of information can also be an important asset to those organizations that choose to capitalize on it. Powerful big data and analytics solutions are now being used to analyze this explosion of information and fundamentally change the way that organizations manage their daily operations. Big data as a concept is great. But organizations that rely on big data to make strategic decisions are missing the point. In order to use data effectively. An economical and effective data management approach is to keep data where it is generated, leave it in its original form, and run analytics close to that dataeven while it is in motion. For the stored data, companies must develop a defensible disposal strategy. Defensible disposal enables organizations to lower the run rate of storage, reduce legal expenses, and mitigate risk. Big data and analytics can also help organizations eliminate the hidden costs of smaller IT initiatives. Open source is everywhere and everything. The ability to create new applications quickly, reliably and economically is drawing businesses big and small to open source and emboldening them to use it for ever-larger projects. Lowering costs remains the top reason companies elect to participate in open-source projects, they now view open source as a way to drive innovation, shorten time to market, and improve the quality of their software. It's now driving the innovation agenda for the entire industry, offering higher-quality software and more room to shape that software to meet individual needs.The digitization of business is in full swing, and is playing out in the competitive landscape of nearly every sector of the economy. In this atmosphere of pervasive disruption, every firm must be highly innovative and agile enough to respond to rapidly changing business demands. In short, the Internet has changed, companies are changing.