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Calling all Young and Innovative Tech Companies

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:42

Entrepreneur, Technology, and Innovation – is this the trifecta of what it takes to make it in today’s economy and ever changing landscape of the as-a-service space?

The SIIA is excited to launch our NextGen program for its 8th year. This program showcases the competitive nature of what truly makes a company the next generation of young companies to watch. We are calling all companies that are transforming the software and services industry. By being selected as one of the NextGen companies, you will receive:

Apply today to gain industry exposure, secure funding, form strategic partnerships, gain new customers, or form your exit strategy.

Webinar – Critical Success Factors for an Enterprise Mobile Strategy

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:56

Webinar Description

Organizations must fully develop an enterprise mobile strategy that considers both employee and customer facing aspects of today’s continually expanding use of mobile technologies. It is important to consider the customer experience as they launch new products, services, and applications. Grant Thornton LLP brings the perspective of working with both ISVs and the consumers of their products in a business advisory capacity. This recorded webcast focuses on several key aspects of an enterprise strategy:

Click here to download the slides.

Presenters
Tony Hernandez, Principal, Business Advisory Services, Grant Thornton LLP
Mike Barba, Manager, Business Advisory Services, Grant Thornton LLP

CODiE Awards Judges: A Conversation with the Coordinator

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:59

Nominations have closed for the 2013 CODiE Awards, and I am definitely excited about the variety and caliber of products in this year’s program. I know our judges are looking forward to reviewing the products as well. Our first round review is the core of the CODiE Awards. It is also the portion of the program that gives me the most interaction with the judges and nominees. I am constantly in contact with both groups, ensuring that everyone has a great experience.

What is the first round review?

For the first round review, two judges review each product in each category. For example, products nominated in two categories will be assigned four judges. During this first round, judges participate in product demonstration s given by the nominees. Two options are available for the products demonstrations:

– Live product demonstration: Nominations walk through their product webinar-style with the judges participating as they do the walk-through

– Recorded product demonstration: Nominees may already have a video product demo that can be sent to the judges to watch.

We recommend that the nominees keep the demos to under an hour. If it is a live demo, remember to leave time for Q&A with the judges.

The first round review also includes product access. It’s beneficial for the judges to get a feel for the product on their own, as a supplement to the guided demo. Product access can happen in several forms, including temporary online login information or by sending the physical product to the judge.

I also suggest sending as much additional information as you would like to the judges. This can be additional links to PDF’s, videos, news releases, etc.

Who are the judges?

We take great care in selecting the industry experts who volunteer as judges. Each division reviews every judge application to determine if he/she is qualified. We want to ensure there are no conflicts of interest.

For our software and content categories, the judges consist of industry executives and analysts, members of the media, bloggers, investors, and even some customers.
For our education categories, we use educators and administrators as our judges. They are the users of these products and can best determine what products may work the best in their classrooms.

Judging is a great experience because it gives the customers a chance to review the products and provide feedback that the companies can use to make improvements.

How can you help?

We are still looking for judges in several of our categories in Content, Software, and Education. If you are interested in judging or can recommend a colleague please complete our brief judge application.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wendy Tanner Wendy Tanner is CODiE Awards Coordinator. Follow the CODiE Awards on Twitter @CODiEAwards

Software Division CEO Insights: Audrey Spangenberg, FPX

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:44

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Mobile remains a top priority for FPX in 2012. FPX’s core business centers on enabling sales teams to be more successful by responding quickly, if not instantly, to the needs and requests of their prospects and customers. Since every sales situation today is highly competitive, buyers have the power. FPX is committed to equipping our customers to serve their prospects whenever and wherever those customers expect; enabling them to take action immediately. Only a solid mobile component of a greater sales process system can do that.

When sales people have the solutions they need at their fingertips, they have the information they need to give their prospects the confidence needed to buy.

Our commitment to providing superior mobile solutions, beginning with the Budgetary Quotes Mobile App that we released in late 2011, means platform agnostic apps. Our strategy is to continue to develop mobile apps for people, not for a specific device. Our core competency is to exceed the expectations of our customers, allowing them the ability to access their sales systems and solutions from any mobile device.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

Cloud computing, and the Software-as-a-Service model, will prove the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth today and for the foreseeable future. The transformative power of the cloud is driving innovation virtually everywhere, but its most significant impact will come from bringing to bear the power of solutions previously only available through on-premise systems without the inherent expenses.

This is already creating a movement away from on-premise software installs to SaaS solutions, especially under certain conditions. In the CRM and Configure-Price-Quote® marketplace, SaaS provides undeniable benefits including lower initial cost and total costs of ownership, higher ROI, and reduced strain on IT resources to name a few.

FPX is committed to this model. As one of a very limited number of providers of SaaS-based, multi-tenant sales process solutions, we are increasingly attracting enterprise customers who, in the past, would have had to select a big-box on-premise software provider.

This demand is already pervasive. Adoption to the Cloud empowers companies to transform their business models and gain a competitive advantage. The Cloud allows companies to be agile and enable the development of effective virtual business processes, which will facilitate their employees, customers, partners and suppliers to connect and conduct business seamlessly.

According to a recent study by Bain & Company, the cloud computing share of the tech wallet will quadruple by 2020, growing nearly six-times faster through the end of the decade than spend on legacy hardware and software.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media and social business will impact sales and marketing more than any other area of business. In B2C selling situations, consumers have always had access to the thoughts and opinions of those they trusted. This provided consumers a limited degree of power in making personal purchase decisions. For the most part, however, retailers have held most of the power.

Online social media has radically shifted the power in the B2C space from retailers to consumers. Consumers in the early stages of the purchase process now have ready access to others who are farther along in that same process. They can search out reviews, polls, comments, and can even engage in conversations about retailers, products and brands with those they choose and trust. This arms them with knowledge long before they enter a store or engage with an online retailer. Further, the input of others can either undermines or substantiate the claims made by expensive advertising and marketing campaigns.

In the same way, those responsible for making purchase decisions in B2B environments now have access to the opinions and experiences of those with similar responsibilities. Using social media including LinkedIn, salesforce.com’s Chatter, Twitter and a myriad of other specialized networks, decision makers have access to credible sources of information prior to and during the vendor selection process.

The use of social media among business professionals levels the communication playing field. A buyer in a B2B situation can quickly investigate any claim made by a sales person or contained in a company’s marketing collateral. Companies who exaggerate their claims do so with a high degree of peril. However, companies that are committed to customer success will be rewarded for their efforts. As the use of social media increases among business professionals, companies selling to other companies must remember that they are ultimately selling to people. Social media has the potential to push the phrase B2B into obsolescence, making P2P the new reality.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Karthic Athreya, ForteHCM

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:44

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

As you look around the globe, which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years?

Most of recent growth trajectory and net job addition seems to be coming from mobility/ social space. With more and more people accessing their social, email and other day to day functions/ applications via their mobile, app development in mobile is a given. India as a target & growth market cannot be ignored. Tele-density has been increasing at a random pace and the telecom sector itself has been growing at more than 25%. Some interesting dynamics include land line adoption of only ~ 35 million whereas cell phone adoption at ~ 882 million. Recent Mckinsey study revealed that India’s internet users will increase fivefold by 2015 and more than 3 quarters of them will choose mobile access. Gartner sees the penetration reaching 82% in 2014.

Yet with all this growth, infrastructure is a challenge and it isn’t going to be easy. Of the country’s 100 million Internet users, just 12.5 million have broadband, compared with 450 million households in China. Internet speeds are sluggish compared to international average of 5.6 mbps. Policymakers are trying to solve this by utilizing cable TV lines. However there are couple challenges to this approach-most of the subscribers only have analog connection and upgrading infrastructure isn’t going to be cheap. Secondly it isn’t going to be easy to up convert an analog box to digital box. Given the demographics, companies might have to push the box at real low price.

Now, where there is a challenge there is an opportunity. Mobile content and applications could be the answer.

There are over 850 million registered mobile numbers (these numbers are skewed as there are multiple accounts registered to the same user). Average revenue per registered number has fallen over the years and service providers are constantly looking for ways to up that. Mobile apps if delivered at affordable prices and with the right content will deliver attractive returns to content and application development companies. As long as the applications are compelling and tuned to local demographics (more so with all the different languages spoken and read) and the pricing right (in order to attract the low end of the demographics), all players can make some money. With mobile advertising picking steam, local ads could be another money spinner.

If email takes a backseat to Facebook, Twitter, and SMS for business communication in 5 years, how will that change your business strategy? What are you doing today to prepare for that possibility?

It is true that new channels have come up but I think there is a synergy between new channels and email. You still need an email to login to Twitter and Facebook. You still get notifications via email for updated info and new followers. It is true that web based email is starting to take a back seat but that is web based. Mobile email usage is skyrocketing. In fact comscore’s own numbers show that about 30% of American mobile users regularly access email via smartphones / mobile devices.

Numerous studies have shown that email is still one of the most effective ways to drive online and offline sales, and is the preferred method by which consumers are notified of offers. Sure, there are better ways to communicate a single line or a short message but the way twitter and Facebook is set up, it is difficult to imagine that someone would send a contract via social sites.

While in about 5 years Facebook and the probably likes may take over intranet communications, for all external communications email still might make sense. I wouldn’t change the business strategy yet…

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Jeremy Roche, FinancialForce.com

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:25

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This year, a majority of cloud spending is coming from the corporate IT budget rather than business unit people buying SaaS on the side, which you saw in years past. More and more, FinancialForce.com is being introduced to customers by the IT department. A number of years ago, the IT group saw the cloud as a threat, but now IT actually sees the cloud as strategic and something that they can evolve around as well. They are clearly starting to embrace it. I see that there is a distinct move towards corporate budgets buying these cloud solutions now, not departmental budgets trying to work their way around IT departments. This starts to take us close to a tipping point, where people are using cloud technologies, not as a sideline, but as a mainstream part of their business. From an IT spending perspective, I suspect that we are going to see more spending on cloud technology and we’re going to see IT budgets increasingly allocated to it, rather than cloud expensed ad hoc against departmental budgets.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media, enterprise social media in particular, is coming along at the right time. Companies today are increasingly leveraging virtual business models utilizing more subcontractors, home workers and geographically dispersed employees. Social media apps like Chatter do a great job of connecting people and the business information held in your business applications, regardless of where they sit in the world or where they sit on the organization chart.

That’s almost an expectation in something like the professional services space. I think this is why you will see professional services organizations lead in the adoption of social media in businesses. They have the killer use case for social media. They operate virtually and work in teams. In that business, your teams need to be in synch and collaborate in real time across sales, services and finance. The project work is social by nature, so the lines need to blur across teams and encompass the customer. We are very focused on this area and are delivering innovative applications to help our customers collaborate not just internally, but also collaborate more closely with their customers. For instance, FinancialForce.com’s professional services customers are using Chatter to follow project activity on a project wall, so that disparate teams can monitor a project’s progress and gain visibility to project management conversations.

When you think about it, most companies are working “socially” already, but they are doing it the hard way – conference calls, voice mail, IM and email. Worse, those conversations are all disconnected from core business systems, with no audit trail and no connection to customer or project data. It is difficult to run a virtual company this way. Companies are using really expensive, hardworking people to bridge the technological data gaps with phone calls.

So, I think we will see collaboration and social apps become even more mainstream inside companies in the coming years. I think business people had a hard time grasping why they would need Facebook or Twitter-like functions inside their companies. I fault the industry for selling it that way. Tools like Chatter are encouraging collaboration inside companies in ways we haven’t seen before and it is paying off in a big way. FinancialForce.com customers are breaking down the barriers between sales and accounting, for instance, to help collect cash and reduce bad debt as a team, and essentially providing a better service to their customers.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Without question, mobile is now part of enterprise IT planning. Mobile devices will soon become a primary way people consume cloud applications. We’re going to see a lot more action around tablets with mobile applications and analysts predict that there will be more than 20 times the current amount of mobile cloud based applications by 2014. Technology is changing the way we socialize and the way we socialize is influencing the way we build and use technology. We have several apps on the drawing board for 2012, including some designed exclusively for senior managers and some for field employees, such as doing project time entry from your mobile phone.

As such, I see the conversations on cloud as a topic going down, and the conversations on mobile and social applications coming up, although the cloud is the enabler. There is much more to these applications than just being in the cloud in an IT sense – there is genuine business value in them and there are genuine ways for people to innovate.

Our customers may be visiting a client, for example, and want to know the current payment status before they walk into the meeting; or they may be on the road, but need access to the latest KPI’s and financial reports. FinancialForce Mobile leverages the Force.com mobile application platform, enabling customers to use a variety of mobile devices including Blackberries, iPhones and iPads to access financial and project data. Essentially, FinancialForce.com mobile applications enable customers to access accounting and project services information anytime, anywhere, boosting productivity and saving valuable time.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Joe Payne, Eloqua

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:17

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Let’s Talk: Making B2B Apps More Social

Go to just about any business event, attend a webinar, download an ebook or whitepaper, and social media invariably comes up.

And it’s for good reason. From a business perspective, social connects us to prospects and customers like never before. When people make decisions about where they are going to eat, what hotel they will book, what conference to attend, and, yes, what vendor they’ll sign with, that decision is increasingly a social one. We want to know what our network of friends and colleagues think.

That has changed the game for app developers, who are increasingly designing in an interconnected ecosystem. Consider this: 20 million Facebook apps are installed each day. Clearly, people like it when their apps connect with their social world.

So our expectations have shifted. That apps work together seamlessly is taken for granted. My Spotify will tell my Facebook friends what I’m listening to. I can update Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously from TweetDeck. Edits to a Google Doc can be done right from my Box account.

Our apps are not social simply because they push status updates to Facebook, but because they communicate with each other. I push a button in this app and it updates another app. It just works.
While this is the norm when it comes to consumer apps, the B2B industry has been slower to accept this change. The B2B infrastructure is fragmented. For too long, companies developed services as if they were in a vacuum, designing products that solve one particular pain point without thought for how it would work in the larger app marketplace.

That’s too bad because if anyone needs social apps, its B2B customers. We deal with long, often complicated sales cycles. To win these deals we deploy an always-growing selection of apps to grab buyers’ attention, educate them and earn their trust. But when these apps live in a silo, unable to talk to each other, we’re left with spotty data, a pile of spreadsheets and incomplete picture of the targeted buyer’s behavior.

In other words, if the attendee data from the webinar I just ran doesn’t connect with the platform I used to market that event and the CRM my sales team is logging into every day, I’m just painting by numbers. I can’t see how the different apps I’m running are impacting the sale. And without knowing the revenue the app helps generate, the harder it is to justify paying for it.

The industry is adapting. Expect more announcements about developer centers and centralized marketplaces where apps work in concert. Features like social sign-on, which make life easier for the buyer and the seller, are taking root. An email sent from iPad can get recorded in my marketing automation and CRM systems.

Put simply, B2B apps need to be more social. The market demands it. As social media alters the professional landscape, apps give us the ability to adapt on the fly. But not if they only work boxed up in a vendor’s platform.

It won’t be enough to create a “cool” app this year. In 2012, the killer app is integration.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Morris Panner, DICOMGrid

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:15

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years and why:

One of the most important emerging trends in software today is true healthcare IT innovation. Traditionally, innovation and healthcare infrastructure simply did not go together. Innovation in healthcare was in drug discovery and medical devices. Healthcare IT was the red headed stepchild, dominated by legacy vendors. It would be as if Siebel still ruled the CRM roost.

A new generation of companies is changing that, driving new investment dollars and interest into the sector. A combination of demographics and regulation are creating an appetite in the healthcare industry for change.

First, there is the unavoidable math of an aging population and expanding healthcare needs. The cost pressures are far outstripping anyone’s budget expectations. As a result, innovation in how information is shared and used is a natural option for trying to control costs.

Second, the government has pushed the healthcare industry to develop more open standards and share more data. Putting aside the most controversial elements of the healthcare reform, the Government already pays more than 50 cents of every healthcare dollar in reimbursements. As a result, government mandates to share information and to provide more visibility in pricing and healthcare results will not go away.

As a result of these trends, hospitals are changing the way they think about the role of healthcare innovation and are starting to consider SaaS systems to give them the same flexibility that other enterprises have found with innovations in CRM and ERP.

The next five years will be a critical time as these innovations take root and find their own particular place in the healthcare universe, where privacy concerns and other factors make it a challenging, but very rewarding IT environment.

How do I see the role of the IT department evolving:

In no area is the IT landscape changing faster than in healthcare. For years, healthcare IT was not considered the sexy part of healthcare. Drug discovery and medical devices captured the VC innovation dollars. Although IT supported these advances, the IT Departments were not center stage.

That is no longer true as the best and the brightest find themselves attracted to the challenges of healthcare IT and its critical role in controlling costs, improving patient access and ensuring lifesaving information can be delivered to and shared by those who need it.

As a result, the healthcare IT departments are finding themselves in uncharted waters. Most importantly, they are moving away from traditional enterprise systems and exploring cloud-based solutions. These take the form of SaaS software solutions as well as hybrid cloud solutions, where highly-available configurations enable large amounts of data to be available closest to the point of care.

Cloud solutions are essential for the reducing cost, but IT teams need to understand the privacy and access control implications of these solutions. Granular business rules and innovative authentication schema (think on-line banking) are enabling healthcare departments to grant access to those who need it, while safeguarding privacy. Regulatory mandates, such as HIPPA, require that healthcare providers not only abide by rigorous privacy regimes, but maintain audit records so that they can prove compliance.

Pure cloud solutions, however, do not always work for healthcare, simply because of the amount of data involved and the just-in-time nature of healthcare delivery. Although some healthcare record data resembles any other piece of business data, healthcare information, such as diagnostic imaging, produces immense file sizes in complex formats. Imagine that you are a surgeon working in an operating room and you need to see an MRI right away. If that MRI was done at your hospital, the logical thing is for you to be able to access it locally. Alternatively, if you are working with a patient, who has been transferred from another hospital, you want to be able to access that image from the cloud, so that you can avoid physically transferring a film or CD from another hospital. This is the perfect kind of scenario for a hybrid cloud solution with business logic to ensure that images are always transmitted in the most intelligent way.

Challenges about data access and sharing are going to continue to accentuate the strategic importance of healthcare IT departments. Seeking innovative solutions is going to be a top priority. Successful implementation will be core to a hospitals success.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights: Rick Nucci, Dell Boomi

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:04

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This is one of the most exciting times to be in IT. The cloud is showing the promise of completely shifting the 80/20 paradox in which IT currently spends 80% of their time and money is spent on maintenance, and only 20% on innovation. The cloud enables a shift into IT being more innovative and agile, resulting in greater productivity and moving IT up the value chain into a much more strategic position. True cloud solutions are also proving that they increase time-to-value as compared to their enterprise equivalents, and are thus empowering IT to achieve their desired service levels while being more innovative.

Secondly, the traditional functions and skill sets of IT professionals will shift over time as well, with business process expertise becoming more of their emphasis. Some of the traditional blocking and tackling functions of IT, such as OS and database work, will shift to cloud services. This represents a significant new set of skills that IT will need to learn, providing them with an even richer skill set.

On the application side, IT will move away from installation and coding and into cloud solutions and vendor management. They are still on the hook for upgrades and change control but this is coordinated with the cloud providers vs. performed internally. The net result is that IT will evolve into an “internal” version what Gartner calls a Cloud Service Broker; aggregating, integrating and customizing will become their focus and imperative as IT moves into the cloud.

What’s the future for hybrid cloud strategies?

The hybrid cloud has at least a 10-year horizon. Companies really need to think about their business need and how to move from their current infrastructure to one that’s cloud-based.

The adoption of hybrid cloud strategies has a correlation to the size of the company. Small to mid-sized companies tend to have fewer applications that need to be integrated or moved to the cloud, so they can aggressively make the shift. Mid-market to enterprise companies tend to have a large number of applications and systems that are built on a more complex infrastructure; these companies need to move to the cloud in phases, which makes the timeline longer, and necessitates some type of hybrid cloud. For instance, larger companies tend to take their on-premise applications, move them to a private cloud infrastructure, and de-commission some of the old infrastructure as a phase one. This sets the stage for a move to a 100% cloud-based delivery model. The transition may take several years, but the hybrid cloud as transitional for moving to the cloud, as the full transition to the cloud, will yield the greatest ongoing value to the business.

The mega-vendors are buying up pure-play SaaS companies. Will they succeed in using those acquisitions to help change their companies to the SaaS culture and business model?

No one knows the answer to this question for sure, but it seems to be a smart strategy, especially if the acquirers follow some key steps.

First, don’t mess with success. The mega-vendor made the acquisition for a reason, and with the assumption that the acquired company has figured out a model that’s working. The mega-vendor needs to allow the acquired company to manage itself and thrive as its own autonomous business unit to make this model work. It really comes down to the culture: if the mega-vendor allows its new business unit to continue to operate in a way that’s been successful – and if they can align their businesses from revenue recognition, go-to-market, marketing and sales perspectives – it works. If the mega-vendor expects the acquired company to assimilate into their culture, however, this business model is less likely to prove successful.

The mega-vendor also needs to keep the acquired company’s leadership team intact as much as possible, and then give them a seat at their table so they can have a high degree of influence over the direction of the company.

Of course all of this assumes that the mega-vendor is factoring in a few important considerations before making the acquisition, such as:

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

Software Division CEO Insights:Eileen Boerger, CorSource Technology Group, Inc.

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:02

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

In looking back at this decade, the ability for a decision maker to access all forms of required data, analyze the data, and use the analysis to make informed business decisions in a “just-in-time” manner will be considered one of the most impactful technical advancements driving business growth.

Businesses make decisions every day that affect the operations of their business and ultimately contribute to the success or failure of their business. Companies that effectively use data to make informed business decisions are outperforming companies who have not figured out how to use their data.

The following table is derived from two Aberdeen Group reports (“The Analytical Masses – Building Self Service Insight for Line-of-Business Decision Makers”, July 2011 and “Data Management for BI – Big Data, Bigger Insight, Superior Performance”, January 2012):

Company Performance

Annual Revenue Growth %

Days to Integrate New Data Sources

% Critical Info Delivered On Time

% Annual Increase in Accessible data

Best-in-Class

27%

21

94%

32%

Industry Average

12%

53

77%

16%

Laggard

1%

130

41%

6%

In my opinion, the above table shows a strong correlation between the ability to access and analyze required data and make timely business decisions to positively impact the growth of a company.

The problem of data and data analysis will grow throughout the decade. Today we are already seeing data volumes grow in size as well as complexity. According to 2011 research by the Aberdeen Group, organizations saw an average increase in data volume of 38% over the previous 12 months. In my opinion, the growth of data volume and complexity will not stop. Capturing, storing and managing data will continue to be an issue. How to effectively use data to gain insight to make better and quicker business decisions will become an even bigger issue that will become more important to solve. This means that businesses will realize that they must get a handle on their “big data” issues and will demand solutions to address these issues.

As these demands grow, solutions will emerge, and more and more companies will be able to make more informed business decisions and drive business growth.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

The various forces that are transforming the IT landscape are providing useful information to make business decisions, moving IT infrastructures to the cloud, and the effects of a more mobile workforce. As companies realize that they must address these forces, they will realize that not only will business processes need to change, but the role of IT must also change.

In my response above, I identified how solving the “big data” issue will be considered the most technical advance driving business growth in this decade. In solving this issue, the IT department will play a key role. However, their role will not be as the provider of the data and reports, but as the provider of a robust information infrastructure that provides access to many forms of data wherever they reside (for example, data on employee devices including mobile devices, data in the cloud, or data from public sources). And, the IT department must provide the right tools for the business decision makers to analyze and manipulate the data to make business decisions.

This requires the IT department to collaborate with the business decision makers to understand what data they need and how they use the data for decision making. Then the IT department must become experts at finding and integrating data into their information infrastructure, identifying analytical tools to use on the data, and educating the business decision makers as to how to most effectively use the data and tools to gain more meaningful business insight. In other words, the IT department will enable the business decision makers to be much more informed as they make decisions.

Moving the IT infrastructure to the cloud implies that the IT department will no longer be responsible for supporting the IT infrastructure (except for those parts of the infrastructure that are locally based such as desktops, laptops, etc). This will allow the IT department to focus more on being a strategic partner of the company’s business leaders. The IT department’s role will be to ensure that appropriate technologies are being effectively used to further the growth and profitability of the company. This means that the IT department must anticipate the evolution of technology in order to plan ahead for the use of new technologies in the company.

One key set of technologies that the IT department must ensure is being properly used are mobile technologies. Today, enterprises are under constant pressure to integrate the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets into the IT environment. Years ago when the workforce went mobile with laptops and notebooks, the problem was much simpler. Most enterprises supplied laptops to their employees and managed those laptops carefully. In today’s environment, employees are buying their own mobile devices and demanding that they can use them for business (usually starting with e-mail access). The IT department must work with the company’s management to ensure policies and procedures are in place to guarantee the security of the company’s information regardless of how the information is accessed.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware


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