Tag Archives: Data

Future IT trends: Experts pick out their top tips

Leave a reply

Having a strong idea of the next innovation to affect the business can make the difference between a good and a great CIO. So, what’s next on the agenda for business technology? I asked five experts to try and predict the future of IT inside and outside the enterprise:

Denis McCauley, director of global technology research at the Economist Intelligence Unit, spends time researching future trends in IT and augmented reality – where computer-generated data is used to enhance live, real-world environments – is one of the areas that receives most attention.

McCauley says augmented examples might include additional information, such as facts and figures, being added to sporting broadcasts. “What you have there is something that is not totally virtual but which uses computer-generated data to enhance the viewing experience,” he says.

Businesses and vendors are expected to invest in new areas, with Juniper Research suggesting that mobile augmented reality revenues will approach $1.5bn by 2015. McCauley says some CIOs believe augmented reality could have an application in specific areas of business, such as customer service and staff training.

“Customer service reps could have multiple screens overlaid with increasing amounts of information,” says McCauley. “And gaming, which isn’t used that much in organisations yet, could be used as a tool to augment training and brainstorming activities.”

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.

Five tips for CIOs looking to harvest social media data

1 Reply

Individuals inside and outside the organisation now use a range of social tools to engage with the business. So how can CIOs make the most of this online conversation and use unstructured social data to help shape better products and services? Here I present a recent article for silicon.com, where I polled five IT leaders for five top tips:

Tip 1 – Identity the themes and address the customer: John Bates, CTO at Progress Software, says last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was the first example of a major company such as BP having its reputation damaged through an inadequate response to social media: “They didn’t respond effectively and they got badly hurt,” he says.

Much has been written about the oil giant’s struggle to incorporate social media into its communications crisis plan. Bates says CIOs must help the business identify underlying issues addressed through social media and find a means to deal with customer-identified themes.

“Social media is a series of events and Twitter is the medium that can potentially damage the reputation of governments and businesses. If someone says something about your organisation, you need to raise the issue and understand what the sentiment says about your business,” Bates adds.

“Social is not just about the technology. It’s actually more about the culture. The 21st-century customer understands the culture of social media. Your business has to understand why people would want to go out on to the internet and to collaborate.”

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.

Cloud security: Problems may lie closer to home

Leave a reply

Lock-in, data security, compliance and lack of control all feature on CIOs’ lists of cloud issues, but this feature by me for silicon.com shows how bigger problems may be sitting on the IT leader’s doorstep:

The biggest inhibitors to the cloud are well known and usually include issues such as data security, regulatory compliance and vendor lock-in. These barriers usually involve external factors, including the stability of suppliers and the influence of regulatory bodies.

Such concerns are crucial, but is there too much focus on external factors at the expense of internal processes? Are CIOs worrying too much about on-demand factors beyond their control and not paying enough attention to the last mile of the network?

IT leaders can spend time and money establishing strong partnerships with suppliers that meet tight demands on information security and data access. But any agreement with external partners, and the potential to use technology on demand, is only as valuable as the supporting internal structure.

To read the rest of the feature, click here.