A backlash against increased personalisation through Net-based
data analysis threatens the progress of customer relationship
management (CRM) systems.
Tom Willmott, president and chief executive officer of Aberdeen
Group, issued a stark warning to supply industry leaders. "A huge
clashpoint is coming soon," he said.
The enormous capability for analysing personal data will
exacerbate concerns about data privacy, and lead to increased
government involvement and regulation, he said.
Speaking at the CSSA conference, Willmott also listed the six
key issues facing the IT industry this year. Of these, he believes
the most critical for the development of e-business is the need for
suppliers to abandon proprietary activities and work with common
standards.
Although many commentators have mooted XML as an integration
silver bullet, Willmott warned that users cannot expect it to solve
all their standardisation issues in the short-term.
He was responding to concerns raised by early user adopters of
e-procurement and other e-business-related systems, who are
increasingly concerned about which version of XML to back.
Although XML is a global standard, agreed by the World-Wide Web
Consortium, there is no industry consensus on standard nitty-gritty
schemas for defining the meaning of the data eg how accounting
records are formatted. These are essential for transferring data
using XML. Various vertical sectors are looking at ways of defining
schemas, and products such as Biztalk to define industry
templates.
Drawing on feedback from his US-based interest groups, Willmott
said, "People don't believe XML will solve everyone's requirements
by the end of 2000, but other companies are building their versions
of XML optimised for specific types of application.
"In the long-term, however, standards for processing will be
based on the XML environment," he said.
Aberdeen's key trends for 2000
- Inter-enterprise collaboration, which is moving centre stage
this year. It is essential for improving e-business
productivity
- Customer relationship management, which comes of age this year
but which will also bring privacy issues to the fore
- A continuing explosion in bandwidth demand fuelled by increased
use of streaming media, Internet telephony and larger transaction
volumes
- Resurgence of high-end mainframe systems to manage disc farms
and other high-performance processing applications.
- Need for wide range management, security, network, and other
common standards for e-business take off
- A continued trend for the digital economy to shape financial
markets and for stock to fund research and development
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