Trend #4: Follow the Money, Business-led Tech Innovation Will Disrupt and Drive Growth

Four Trends That Will Shape 2014 

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe

will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics. Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts. I invite you to follow this short series through my first, second and third installments and now my fourth (and final) below.  Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's product priorities as well. I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

Putting more data to work drives innovation.  Innovation can transform processes, products, services and people. Our newfound ability to cost-effectively analyze and find hidden patterns in huge swaths of data will enable a new generation of business-led technology innovation.  With this trend, the IT organization must find new ways to integrate and collaborate within the enterprise, becoming an enabler of business-led innovation.  This collaboration is more important than ever as technology now defines the new economic battleground for every industry and organization.  Even Gartner’s latest predictions abound with a Digital Industrial Revolution theme and watchwords for CIOs and their IT organizations to either lead or get out of the way.  It’s a bold new world.

All companies are now technology companies.  Every organization must put technology to work in ways that create distinction and competitive advantage.  Evidence of this trend can be found in any industry-leading company today, where IDC says that business units already control 61% of tech spending.  Fortunately, the technological barriers to entry have never been lower.  Organizations of all sizes now have affordable access to powerful, enterprise tools, which levels the playing field, allowing even small companies to compete with the big guys (sometimes even more effectively, because of their nimbleness).  One example is AirIT, which can help every airport become a technology-enabled data center, driven by metrics relevant to the business, which in turn, streamline operations and save money.

Leading enterprises will overtly staff, skill and organize to maximize innovative uses of technology – creating a cascade that will impact education, training and personnel management in all corners of the organization.  Even military organizations realize that gaining skill and expertise in data and analytics will remain at the forefront for personal advancement.  The risk for all is that a concentration of even deeper technology skills will create digital haves and have-nots within industries, creating a difficult spiral for laggards.

Lastly, in order for business-led tech innovation to really flourish, many more knowledge workers (than today) must have access to just the right amount of data and analysis, at the right place and the right time (not too much, not too little), which promises to make everyone into a more capable analyst and decision maker (regardless of job level, title and even skill).  In 2014, analytics becomes a thing that you do, not a place that you go and the need for intelligence inside of the applications and business processes we use every day becomes an agent of business-led tech innovation.