McKinsey indentifies collaboration, Internet of things and cloud as key business technology trends

An interesting article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly has identified 10 technology-enabled business trends that it says is reshaping enterprises worldwide. Many of the trends are close to our heart at Orange Business Live! and the article follows on from a similar piece from McKinsey written two-and-a-half years ago. The 10 technology trends it has identified are:

·         Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream: using the web to bring communities of interest together and collaborate for product development, marketing or customer support. This trend has grown out of the success of initiatives such as Open Source software development and Wikipedia;

·         Making the network the organization: opening the borders of the enterprise or functional groups to enable wider collaboration towards common goals. Other networks include online labor markets such as Mechanical Turk or advertising contest services such as Zoopa;

·         Collaboration at scale: the increasing importance of collaboration technology and tools to help knowledge workers increase their efficiency and boost overall "organizational capital";

·         The growing 'Internet of Things': we cover this topic regularly in the blog - most recently in an interview with Geoffrey Zbinden from Orange. It is where objects are equipped with sensors and communication capability and can make processes more efficient or create new business models;

·         Experimentation and big data: with the amount of data captured and processed by enterprises ever increasing there is a potential to glean business intelligence and redesign business processes on the fly or keep on top of rapidly changing market trends;

·         Wiring for a sustainable world: this trend refers to the continuing importance of green IT and the push towards IT for green, which has been extensively covered by Orange blogger Axel Haentjens, for example here;

·         Imagining anything as a service: there's little doubt that cloud computing is a major trend in enterprise computing and software as a service and infrastructure as a service have entered the general lexicon. Network service providers have been tipped as future leaders here by analysts Ovum as I wrote last week in the blog;

·         The age of the multisided business model: this refers to new business models that don't fit into the neat B2B or B2C categories, such as the "freemium" model, where some customers get free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use - Flickr is an example of this;

·         Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid: the increasing importance of innovation in developing markets, such as rural Africa, where mobile banking is taking hold in a big way. Again covered in Live!;

·         Producing public good on the grid: the final trend is the role of technology in imporving public service, such as e-Government or even initiative such as FixMyStreet.com, where citizens can report problems such as flytipping.