What do you think will be the next three technologies to have a
business impact and why?
Power to the citizen
Business impact is likely to occur at both the citizen/customer end
of the spectrum and within the service management arena. The price
reductions, user uptake and awareness of the benefits of the
national broadband infrastructure will have an even greater
impact.
This may be through companies wishing to satisfy customer needs
through self-service, through new flexible working policies where
staff can benefit from secure home or remote working with virtual
private networks, or simply through reducing communications
costs.
Customer relationship management systems, currently focused on
sales and delivery, are likely to have an impact in government,
where a citizen-centric focus needs to evolve in line with
e-government targets. Streamlining citizen requests with
back-office integration will, ideally, lead to improved levels of
information, although this equally requires culture change in terms
of information management and exchange within council
systems.
The increase in processing power, combined with faster data access
and the affordability of archiving huge quantities of data thanks
to the proliferation of DVD writers, is enabling computing in the
small business and home environments to be very powerful.
This is particularly important when considered alongside the
availability of low-cost broadband infrastructure and service
provision as it begins to provide a truly connected high-power
electronic environment for companies and individuals.
Richard Woods, The NCC Group
Safe and secure
Customer Pin input at point of sale - the French have had this
for years. It is a significant step forward in reducing credit card
fraud.
Fast access facilities for customers will reduce the great number
of uncompleted transactions that still occur on the web due to
slow/unreliable connections and lead to severe frustration.
Third, we should see CRM systems that actually do just that -
enhance and truly personalise the relationships between customer
and supplier.
Robin Laidlaw, president, Computer Weekly 500 Club
Time for analytics
This is a difficult one as the IT and telecoms sectors look
likely to remain fairly depressed for at least another 12 months. I
would say that analytics software may be attractive to many large
businesses if the world economy remains in a depressed state.
Whether used in a standalone form or built into a CRM or supplier
relationship management package, these tools are as powerful for
identifying cost savings as they are for identifying new market
segments. Otherwise, many large organisations may need to focus on
consolidation of their IT provision over the coming year.
I would like to say that web services are going to take off this
year but I think it may be a bit early. Most of their use so far
seems to be in easing systems integration tasks, rather than
adopting a wholesale web services model. Nevertheless, this kind of
activity may help to develop the pool of web services skills that
will be essential for them to take off.
My second choice is not a new technology as such, but I think that
the number of small- and medium-sized organisations moving to
broadband will continue to increase this year. For some of these
organisations, the next 12 months may open up new opportunities.
Even though the impact on an individual SME may be small, most of
the UK's companies are SMEs, so the cumulative impact could be
significant over the next few years (even for large organisations
acting as customers/suppliers).
My third choice is internet security software. The problems of
spam, viruses and security threats to servers are escalating and,
ase-commerce grows, the risk also becomes more significant. Again,
this is not a new technology per se, but its continual improvement
over the next year will be vital.
Christopher Hemingway, research fellow, Information Systems
Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management
Don't get burned by churn
Application security will be critical in 2003. Enterprise
applications are vital to business success but they are also the
most vulnerable to attack. Businesses need to focus on application
security where the need and return on investment are greatest. A
coherent strategy to prevent, control, monitor, detect and respond
to unauthorised use of applications can deliver a reduction in
enterprise security spending of up to 70%.
Second, churn management technologies will make a big impact this
year. Churn has become a major problem for many leading companies,
shrinking revenues and inflating new customer acquisition costs. To
remedy this, companies need to put in place a churn management
strategy that retains high-value customers and includes end-to-end
customer lifecycle management, data analysis, and monitoring and
measurement tools. We estimate this can reduce churn by 20% to 50%
and improve profits by 12% to 35%.
Systems integration will also continue to be a key focus. The
problem is like an iceberg - IT managers worry too much about the
10% that is above the water (the new and interesting part), instead
of the 90% that is critical to running the business
day-to-day.
Most organisations still run on systems that are between 10 and 30
years old. Unless there is a massive shortfall in functionality, it
will almost never make economic sense to replace these. It is
therefore a question of combining what is available with a little
of what is new, to deliver enhanced functionality.
Klaus Elix, chief technology officer, American Management
Systems (AMS) Europe
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