CxO agenda radar

The impact levels of new and emerging trends are defined as:

Transformational: likely to require transformation changes within organisations.
High: it will have high impact at work on companies (process, products and services) and people walk of live as user / consumer.
Medium: it will impact on people and organisations, enhancing companies process & services or will affect walk of live to users and consumers.
Low: more likely to require minor improvements rather than radical changes.

The status of new trends are defined as:
Emerging (Red): mainly expressed by academia and a very small number of specialised markets.
Adolescent (Amber): expressed more widely by analysts and thought-leaders.
Early adopter (Green): seen more widely by clients markets. Clients starting to look for solutions.
Mainstream (White): there is a clear need and many clients are implementing solutions.

The implications of time and impact of new and emerging technologies are defined as:

Now-1 year: Look today at how solutions address need.
2-3 years: Consider potential solutions with maybe some pilots.
4+ years: Understand now and consider the potential implications and how these could be addressed.

CxO agenda trends

• After emerging from recession, these are times of transition. The economy is transitioning from recession to recovery. Every transition requires leadership, and every transition changes the leader. During the recession, CxOs demonstrated their ability to control costs. In 2010, their agenda will be based on delivering both productivity and capability.
• The goal of lean is to eliminate waste while increasing quality and reducing cost. Up until 1990, the implementation of lean was mostly isolated to manufacturing. Today, however, lean is applied across a variety of industries and sectors. Clients matter most: focusing on delivering value to the client (what they are willing to pay for). People make the difference: managing based on facts and enforcing consequences. Problems are opportunities: addressing the cause of a problem and transforming it into an opportunity.
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. For a company, it requires incorporating social and environmental concerns into value creation by striving for a long-term balance. The consequence is to design new products and services that are CSR-focused, because the consumers will increasingly make choices based on these issues.
•  A ‘prosumer’ is a proactive consumer, culturally and socially aware, building a composite identity of consumer brands, and taking an active role in choosing a product or service. This means access to more (relevant) information 24/7, a demanding task but with considerable reward. Meeting this demand can create one of your organisation’s most important advocates. The ‘prosumer’ must be involved in production choices and be part of the value chain.
• Web 3.0 refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent web’ — such as those using Semantic Web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies — which emphasise machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience. Web 1.0 was the content web, Web 2.0 has generally been regarded as the social web, so Web 3.0 can be defined as the location-aware and moment- sensitive Internet.
• Reducing the overall carbon footprint not only improves operational efficiency but can also improve market perception by showing CSR. Organisations will be expected to include this in financial and management reports. Green IT can be used to leverage the reduction of IT’s carbon footprint by optimisation of storage, consolidation of servers, and transfer to more efficient data centres.
• Globalisation is introducing new opportunities and threats, accelerating the speed at which businesses are changing in order to gain, or maintain, market share. Business Agility is required in order to ensure flexibility to adapt to change and to enable organisations to build a relationship with many types of organisation within the business eco-system.
• The recent financial crisis can be seen as a failure of Corporate Governance. In particular, risk management failed at every level. The flood of governance scandals has weakened markets and eroded trust, threatening a backlash against the legitimacy of business. It has also served as a reminder that companies in any industry will have to develop or strengthen appropriate mechanisms and tools for identifying, modelling, and managing risk at all levels: strategic, operational, and financial.
• The cost of offshoring to countries such as India and China is increasing as the workforce increases its skills and broadens its portfolio to include delivery that requires a skilled workforce — particularly in the field of research. Many more worldwide locations are now being tapped into as potential new offshore locations. Offshoring nearer home is also happening — with alternative, less expensive countries.
• Baby-boomers are starting to retire. They will either retire completely or, for those whose pensions do not bring in enough income and / or are fit and healthy enough to postpone retirement, will continue working, looking for less stressful posts. The knowledge of the ageing workforce may go with them when they retire or, if they stay, their needs must be accommodated.
• Generation Y — those born in the 1980s and 1990s and brought up in the digital world — will become both the new workforce and new clientele. To engage them requires the use of digital technologies that are encompassed by Web 2.0.
• New technology tends to be adopted by consumers before being adopted within business. It used to be that the technology in the workplace was more advanced than that in the home, but not so today. This is the importance of Consumer IT.
• As the Internet gives customers more access to information, more choice, and a louder voice, retaining customers becomes an increasingly complex task requiring customer intimacy.
• With changing demographics, higher fuel prices, and the need to get closer to customers and partners, many more people will work away from the main office. Mobile workers require a new style of management and new communication practices to ensure that they do not become siloed.
• As workers become more mobile and customers want to ensure the safety and origin of products, traceability is key for products from constituents to consumer and for personnel movements and behaviours.
• In the future, many objects will generate data from the moment of their creation. Much of it will be forwarded for purposes like service monitoring, analytics, and secure audit trails. Organisations are at risk of drowning in information.
• In an ever-changing world, the risk of disruption is becoming ever greater as we see more threats from climate change ,terrorism, and even pandemics.

• The economic, business, budget, and operational challenges CIOs faced in 2009 have turned attention to two major initiatives: re- establishing the business relevance of IT and strengthening IT’s productivity. The top initiative for 2010 is positioning the IT organisation as a business partner, so demonstrating business value from IT is the main issue for the CIO leadership; they have to implement business- based IT metrics to measure performance through time.