Seven ways to take advantage of enterprise IT

Technology can help achieve anything today - market differentiation, deepen customer relationships, and deliver growth and profitability. However, adopting a new digital mindset is required to harness the potential. The power and reach of converging IT trends such as mobility and cloud means that business leaders need to understand the implications of a software-driven, ‘connected everything' world."

IT has become core to virtually every aspect of a business. Every business is a digital business and that all senior leaders - not just CIOs - must be able to understand, embrace and drive value from new technologies that affect their organization. Today's software has the potential to change the very business model of a company or industry in the future, according to a new report by Accenture.

The Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report looks at the future of enterprise IT and makes recommendations for how companies can take advantage of technology and software to improve their competitiveness, operations and business results. These include:

Leverage Technology to Create Digital Relationships at Scale: While mobile computing, social networks and context-based services have increased connections with consumers, many companies have lost customer intimacy in the process. These connections have been viewed as another communication or transactional channel rather than opportunities to improve relationships.
Effectively developing meaningful relationships at scale requires a real change in how companies approach these strategies and implement a new unified approach across IT and the business.

Design for Analytics to Get the "Right" Data: Most of today's enterprise software applications are designed for a specific function and capture only the data needed to complete that function. Organizations use existing data as an input to make strategic decisions and often find that information gaps arise because important questions weren't formulated when the applications were being designed. What's needed is a strategy that sees data more as a supply chain than a warehouse. It's about asking the questions that need to be answered first and then designing applications for the "right" data.

Take Advantage of Data "Velocity": Mobility and consumerization of IT are driving expectations for faster access to data and more insights from that data. In addition, a surge of new technologies - including high-speed data storage, in-memory computing, analytics advances, data visualization and streaming data querying - is accelerating the entire data cycle from insight to action and improving the enterprise's ability to deal with greater data velocity.

Make Work and Processes More Social: By embedding collaborative tools into their business processes, enterprises can take advantage of employees' growing comfort with social networks to gain a new level of productivity. Employees don't necessarily need to become more social for collaboration to work; rather, it's the work and processes that need to be more social.

Bridge the Last Mile of Virtualization With Software-Defined Networking: Software-defined networking (SDN), where the network is managed through software instead of through hardware, provides a giant leap forward in enterprise flexibility. With SDN, organizations can reconfigure the connectivity of systems without changing the physical characteristics - making it easier for businesses to manage change, integrate cloud services and get more return from their network investments.

Be Active - Not Just Defensive - With Security: IT's core challenge is to not only stay current with the latest in security, but to get smarter about understanding and engaging the enemy and be able to adapt the enterprise's defenses to match the threat. Security architectures need to remain flexible and incorporate "active" defenses to deal with the constantly changing field of security threats.

The Cloud Is Here - Now is the Time to Prepare the Enterprise: Many organizations are already embedding cloud with their legacy systems and traditional software to create "hybrid" environments. This requires a clear understanding of, and approach to, the skills, architecture, governance and security required, whether it's the applications, platforms or IT infrastructure that's in the cloud.