What’s Changing the Enterprise? The Power of Analytics

Bubble chart data graphWhat major trends are changing the nature of the enterprise environment?

This question is constantly floated among technologists and industry experts, always looking ahead to what the workplace will look like in the next year, five years, and so on. Ars Technica recently made its definitive list, including:

  1. Moving mobile beyond the poor PC substitute
  2. The transformation of the “app”
  3. The social enterprise
  4. The IT department as integrator

We recently discussed the changing role of IT on the blog, and the other points listed are hot topics that come up often in tech industry speculation. The merits and reasoning behind each are sound.

Which do you think will have the biggest impact on the enterprise?

Predicting the future is hard, especially when you have an installed base to consider. But it’s not hard to identify the economic, technological, and cultural forces that are converging right now to shape the future of enterprise IT in the short term. We’re not entering a “post-PC” era in IT—we’re entering an era where the device we use to access applications and information is almost irrelevant. Nearly everything we do as employees or customers will be instrumented, analyzed, and aggregated.

Obviously the title of this post gave away my answer. Data is changing everything and increasing daily. Having the right tools to make meaning of it remains a pain point in many organizations, large and small. The crucial component of each item on the list above is its relationship to data. Our engagement with mobile devices, social networking, cloud computing, and web applications have changed the way we, as people and as companies, collect and share data. They are changing the way users interact with it, and the way the enterprise software industry writes and secures applications. Analytics lies, quite crucially, in the middle of all these major trends of change.

But that’s just me. What do you think?