Tag: disruptive technology

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Cloud Computing Evolved: Disruptive Technology Goes Mainstream

jmbunnyfeetCloud Computing Evolved: Disruptive Technology Goes Mainstream

A 2010 information technology report by IDC (International Data Corporation, a global provider of market intelligence) provided a few interesting predictions for Information Technology in these changing times.  Not surprisingly, many of the predictions centered around the same “ingredients of IT industry transformation” which were identified in past years as being disruptive technologies including cloud computing, mobile devices and applications, wireless broadband, virtualized infrastructure, social networking, and smart devices being among those listed.  The subsequent 2011 report suggested a continuing trend of spending and innovation in cloud technologies and mobile computing and in collecting and analyzing the huge volumes of data being generated.  It is clear that cloud computing is evolving from being disruptive technology to mainstream IT.

Everyone must by now recognize the significant growth in use of online and mobile applications and services.  If you haven’t noticed that just about everyone has a smart phone or tablet computer, then you’ve got your head buried deep in the sand.  What this clearly indicates, and IDC supported the position with quantifiable evidence, is that the “disruptive technologies” of yesterday have transitioned from early adoption to mainstream adoption.   This means that use of these technologies had pushed “well beyond” the first 10 to 15% of the market through 2010, and that customers were ready to integrate these new solutions as core parts of their overall IT strategy.

If you don’t believe that cloud computing, virtualization, and mobile access are becoming (have become?) mainstream, consider the staggering number and variety of mobile devices and networks available today.  The adoption of these devices is driven by the availability of broadband wireless service, and their use is fueled by applications offering “social business” and “pervasive analytics”.  No longer limited as a voice communications device, the mobile phone has now become the mobile workstation, capable of supporting a wide variety of business and personal interactions and functions intended to help users generate and analyze “unprecedented volumes of information” – and the 2011 report indicates that mobile computing is continuing to fuel the trend.

“Mobility wins” will be the top theme of the year as mobile devices outship PCs by more than 2 to 1 and generate more revenue than PCs for the first time. 85 billion mobile apps will be downloaded, and mobile data network spending will exceed fixed data network spending for the first time.

IDC’s 2010 report placed an interesting focus on the impact of this new era of IT, believing that it would be a launchpad for  the creation of “intelligent industry” with an IT-enabled “intelligent economy”.  This doesn’t apply only to those very large multinational corporations, like the IBM commercials about a smarter planet and the commercials where the box tells us where it (and the delivery truck) is.  This new-found intelligence would allow businesses of all sizes to offer better and more customized services locally while dramatically expanding their market reach beyond geographic boundaries, and positioning themselves for accelerated growth.

As the number of intelligent communicating devices on the network will outnumber “traditional computing” devices by almost 2 to 1, the way people think about interacting with each other, and with devices on the network, will change. Look for the use of social networking to follow not just people but smart things.”

Business owners who find a way to leverage this new capability through innovative applications of cloud computing and mobile device access will almost certainly find that their businesses are better suited to addressing the needs of their current market, but are also poised to take advantage of emerging opportunities in emerging markets as well.

In 2010 IDC predicted that by 2012 we would begin to see the “slow death” of cloud computing – the term, not the technology model.  Even though cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords in tech today, the model is becoming mainstream to the point where it is no longer considered a bleeding-edge method of computing requiring its own descriptive name. While IDC may have been a bit off in terms of forecasting the slow death of “cloud” terminology, their finding that the evolution of cloud computing models is rapidly progressing from disruptive to mainstream appears to be spot on.

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetMake Sense?
J

updated from original post in 2010
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Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses: GIGAOM.com

Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses: GIGAOM.com

In a recent article on GigaOm, author Barb Darrow discusses the findings of a survey of small businesses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where it was found that the use of “consumer” information technology is being more widely accepted for use in small businesses, and that many of these selections are happening without the knowledge or participation of the IT department.

“Employees are driving business apps selection in many small and medium businesses, according to new research. A good percentage of productivity, social and collaborative apps now sanctioned by IT in SMBs were brought in by workers without IT knowledge.“

Reporting that small businesses are adopting “consumer” IT, and that it is OK with IT departments, isn’t a surprising finding.  Small businesses have begun leveraging mobility and cloud solutions to their benefit, being able to take advantage of powerful technologies that previously only enterprise IT departments could enjoy.

 “.. the line between personal and workplace technologies has become all but invisible. That poses real challenges to IT departments that have to deal with all sorts of technology coming in over the transom. But it also opens up opportunities for vendors that design easy-to-use consumer apps to enter the business realm as well.”

The cloud introduces new agility and capability for all businesses, not just small business. For IT departments in larger businesses, this is a big IT management issue. For smaller businesses, the IT manager is often the business owner or an occasionally contracted on-site technician.  When faced with IT needs in the business, many small business owners will at some level rely upon the solutions they also use in their personal lives – in many cases, there simply isn’t a budget for both.  The line between business and personal has always been “blurry” for the small business owner.

Make Sense?

J

Read more: Disruptive Trends = Emerging Opportunity: Adapting to a changing technology and business environment

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Everybody Clicks: Keeping in touch with your business online

Everybody Clicks

Keeping in touch with your business online

In today’s technology focused market, it’s hard to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Making that effort to communicate with clients is more than just sending them a quarterly newsletter or email. It’s about evolving your business to meet their needs. Everyone wants everything online these days. It’s not just convenient anymore, it’s expected.

If your business doesn’t provide your clients with the level of online service they have come to expect, they probably won’t stay your clients for very long. If you want to make sure these new expectations are being met it means building and maintaining a presence on the web. That’s right; your website is the new face of your business. It’s often the first thing new clients see so it has to make a good impression. As the old saying goes, “you only get one first impression.” This adage is just as true for your website as it is for you. Old, outdated websites just aren’t good enough anymore. People want somewhere they can go to get the latest updates on the services your business provides, and they want it to be easy to find that information. Maintaining your website, keeping it up to date and full of useful information is important. It can also be time-consuming or expensive.

As a business professional, probably a bookkeeper or accountant, you probably spend as little time as possible managing your website and composing newsletters. Now, imagine that you just got back to the office after lunch and you want to do some work on the company website, maybe check on the traffic statistics while you’re at it. Normally you’d go and log in to three or four different places, one or two to do the work on the site and the other one or two to look at your statistics. This is a waste of time and energy, but not one you can avoid. Now let’s say you have some time left before you go home for the night and you realize you haven’t sent out this month’s newsletter. That’s another site to go log into. Site after site, a new interface or dashboard each time. Not to mention the hassle of entering your new contacts into your CRM or selecting the right recipients for the newsletter from your contacts lists. Everywhere you go there is another step to the process of staying in touch with your clients, to keeping the website updated and accurate. Login after login and dashboard after dashboard. What if there was something that could streamline everything? Keep your company’s blog in the same place as your site traffic statistics or web-based CRM solution? (Wouldn’t that be neat?) One login to get to everything. Keeping your clients informed, organized, and satisfied. Everything you want at the click of a mouse.

Your time is your money, so saving time is saving money. Having all of your online tools in one place would do just that. No wasted time, no need to repeatedly log in. Just getting everything taken care of, from one place. Not to mention your clients’ needs. Every business has a website nowadays; online payment options, blogs, forms to request information, the list goes on and the need for them is not confined to accounting and bookkeeping firms.

Let’s say you’re a small hobby shop, selling model trains and cars with all the odds and ends needed to build or maintain them. Do you rely solely on word of mouth or paper ads to bring you the business you need? Of course not. You get a website. The problem is you don’t know where to start. So, you hire someone to build it for you and to make changes when needed. That gets expensive. Ok, so you build it yourself using one of the many solutions available on the web today. Now you control everything, from the colors and graphics to the content but how do you track the traffic your site gets? Or what information your customers look at the most? Analytics of course! Unfortunately that means another thing to buy and another page to log into. The same goes for CRM solutions or email domains. Each aspect of your business is locked away in its own little corner. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be grand if you could change your homepage, send a newsletter, and track today’s site visits all from one place? Well, that’s where Nakea.net comes in. Nakea.net is a solution that is perfect for any business. It has web design, analytics, email marketing, contact management, and much more all in one place. That’s right.  One login and you have your world at your fingertips.  Just click to log in, and it’s all right there, with easy to use features and templates that allow you to gear your website, and your communications, to your clients and customers.

Make Sense?

Nakea.net, delivering the smartest social website your business can build, is a sponsor of Cloud Summit 2012.

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Disruptive Trends = Emerging Opportunity: Adapting to a changing technology and business environment

Every new day brings some new advancement in business technology, and much of this advancement relates to cloud computing, mobility, and new social computing models.  Information technology and solutions applied to business use have rapidly evolved away from paper-based or fixed-location tools, and are now oriented towards enabling mobility and anytime, anywhere access to business applications and digital data.

Trends driving change in business technology today may be reflected in two main areas: enabling solutions which are revealing benefit not previously recognized, and disruptive approaches which represent trans-formative changes to how businesses operate.   Disruption and transformation often generate new business opportunity, yet many professionals in accounting/finance and information technology fail to see the new potential available and resist anything which represents significant change.  These professionals equate change with risk, and are reluctant to entertain either.

An example of a class of solutions which enable the organization to “know more”, providing decision support through deep analysis and reporting of key business data, is the new generation of data visualization tools now available in forms and formats easily accessible by any business professional.  Previously, business owners had to rely on system analysts and accounting professionals to compile and report on various aspects of business activity.  Using spreadsheets and database driven chart-building systems, manipulation of large volumes of data was unwieldy and limited by available computer resources.  Moving beyond previously recognized boundaries in data collection and aggregation, tools now available assist users in combining data from disparate sources, and offer a rich suite of analytics coupled with the simplicity of drag-and-drop selection and exploration.

The opportunity introduced with this new capability does not rest solely in the analysis of the data.  Rather, it is in the control and the structure which must be developed to ensure that all relevant data being collected, and in the structure and control placed on those data collection and integration processes which will ensure that the information is properly associated or correlated, and accurately integrated into the model.   Completeness and accuracy of data is of critical importance, as is an in-depth understanding of the nuances of structured and unstructured data relationships.

In addition to the enabling solutions emerging on the market which are driving deep changes in how businesses see themselves are the advancements in technology which cause fundamental shifts in how business use technology to support operations.  The most evident advancement, often viewed as an approach which is disruptive to more traditional models, is the emergence of “cloud” computing models.  Cloud computing, connected services, and fully-managed outsourced IT solutions address a number of issues which have burdened enterprise IT deployments since IT departments were invented.

The difficulty for IT managers is that they are often overworked and underfunded, as information technology is not often viewed as a strategic differentiator but merely as a necessary cost of supporting operations.  Users view IT as being unresponsive and ineffective, and have little understanding of the balancing act required to meet user demands and at the same time deliver standardized enterprise computing services in a secure manner.

Mobility and the cloud has changed the landscape of business IT, and the concept of “there’s an app for that” is now fully ingrained in the user mentality.  Cloud solutions, sometimes introduced to the business by non-IT personnel and often viewed as “rogue IT” projects, have won adoption by business users due in large part to the simplicity of implementation, and often because they can deploy the solution quickly, outside of the boundaries established by internal IT management.  Information management within the organization must necessarily extend now to mobile computing devices, where an entirely new set of issues is revealed in terms of personal device management and distribution of corporate data and intelligence.  Professionals assisting the business with information management, access, collection and integration processes must now give greater consideration to incorporation of mobile device and application management, as well as the risks introduced with the broad use of personal computing devices within the organization.

The cloud represents a convergence of social and mobile computing, and introduces an entirely new class of business metrics to measure due to the significant increase in available data captured at various levels and through various types of virtual interactions.  With users being able to engage wherever and whenever they choose (“there’s an app for that”, again), businesses must shift IT focus to strategic enablement, creating standards for outsourced deployments, and infusing each effort with the security and control required, which is a mainstay of IT operations.

Big data, visualization and analysis, and mobile and social computing are changing how we do business.  As the trusted advisor to the business, the accounting professional should embrace these changes and the opportunities they present to deliver more value and service in each client engagement.  Accountants can help their clients understand how to do more with less – leveraging technology to improve operational efficiencies, and to structure, capture, integrate and analyze the relevant data which will reveal the risks and potentials of the operation under a variety of circumstances.

Disruption creates your opportunity to bring order to the chaos, helping clients compete and flourish in a difficult economy, and providing the proactive guidance and analytical support necessary to build and sustain profitability.

Make Sense?

J

  • Read more about how accountants need business intelligence, too
  • Read more about how there’s no fear and loathing in accounting
  • Read more about the pressure on accountants to deliver more value and intelligence to their clients
  • Read more about Data Warriors: accounting in the cloud