The massive growth in the installed base of consumer smartphones, PCs, and tablets is driving rapid change in the interaction model for SMEs, global enterprises, and the public sector with both employees and their customers.
Growing usage of social platforms and accessibility to a greater share of the consumer day via digital channels is enabling new levels of inbound access to the enterprise and public sector. It is also creating a preference, contextual, and behavioral data dividend that the enterprise and public sector can use to deliver highly personalized services through these new communication channels. However, consumers are also employees, and the enterprise and public sector are having to respond to demands from employees to use their consumer devices to access enterprise applications and data, inside and away from the enterprise. Organizations that manage this transition will see an earnings pay-off. Those that do not will see themselves disintermediated by their current competitors and new entrants.
The expanded range of digital channels through which consumers can engage with suppliers of goods and services is creating a rich supply of structured and unstructured data that businesses can use to personalize, target, and manage the customer lifecycle. The potential value of this customer data – the “black gold” of the Web – is drawing in a range of market entrants intent on cultivating, harvesting, and processing it, whether social, location-based, or behavioral. Contenders range from Facebook to Adobe to Google, as well as marketing services groups such as Experian, and traditional business intelligence vendors expanding their analytics and customer interaction management capability, including IBM, Oracle, and SAP. CIOs need to develop functional IT ownership within their marketing organization to integrate these new sources of customer data and applications with existing BI and CRM systems. Ovum will be assessing the vendor landscape and best-practice governance and implementation strategies for the CIO and CEO.
Apple’s strategy to penetrate the enterprise has been to create compelling devices and services that consumers will want to use all day long, whether at work or in leisure. The CIO now faces demands from both digital natives – only now entering the workforce – and C- level executives to use self-provisioned devices and a portfolio of consumer applications to access corporate resources, whether an i- device or a collaboration application such as Skype. This is creating support, cost, and governance challenges, but the CIO has the opportunity to create an environment that encourages employees to use these new tools to do their jobs, but within a set of rules. Ovum will be assessing the tools and appropriate governance strategies in different geographies and industries to enable employee-led innovation and exploit the self-provisioned device dividend.
Mobile computing is stimulating the re-engineering of cross-industry processes such as payments, logistics, and public sector services. Mobile computing is enabling the delivery of non-digital services to be enhanced via innovative application interfaces, with resource allocation determined in realtime through analysis of end-user consumption patterns. This is creating opportunities for managed application development platforms, next-generation data warehousing and analytics appliances, software, and services. However, process re-engineering is also creating opportunities for more than just the IT industry: new market entrants and new business models also stand to gain. The payments industry, for example, is seeing new entrants looking to exploit shifts in the architecture of payments enabled by mobility and web apps. Ovum will be assessing the opportunity for IT markets and the forces creating disruption to existing systems.
