2011 was noted as the year that demonstrated the “power of the human emotion.” It was the year where human emotion exhibited itself through mediums that go beyond satisfaction surveys. With emergence of more sophisticated social media , advanced mobile technologies and highly user friendly computing platforms, people world over have found new mediums to express , collaborate and even bring down governments. The emergence of “human collaboration” and its associated platforms will be the most watched trends in the coming years, here are a sample pick of my favorite emerging business -technologies.
Social Media and the Emergence of Big Data
Social Media, has emerged as the biggest go-to business model in 2011. The increasingly large amount of data that many social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc. generates have created large scale challenges and wonderful opportunities.
Social Media is now a huge kingdom and data (big data) of every size are its subjects. Simply put, every action undertaken on the social media generates data and every data can cause a business action or inaction. According to IBM – “Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data–so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.” Big data (or data generated from social Media) is large and is expanding at a pace that out beats the best economies in the world.
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Organizations have started focusing on driving customer experience, segmentation and sentiments through social media inputs. For example large organizations are constantly checking the customer feedback on its social media pages to understand market sentiments and feedback. This data and changes in the data is now driving customer centric programs like demographic based advertisements and marketing programs. Companies are also using advanced complex algorithms to check fraud, do sentiment analysis etc.
What’s more, every reaction of the user is analyzed for sentiment and large scale user sentiment leads to specific decisions. So when you cuss on Facebook and declare to the world that your meal was bad, or when you tweeted that your friend brought a new Mercedes on getting a promotion – it generates an equal or un-equal data relation, which when monitored leads to either a business action or inaction.
2012 will see the emergence of Social Media, Big Data and the trend indicates large scale investments in data cccessibility and storage (Hadoop, IBM Watson, GreenPlum) which in turn will lead to newer technologies in data segmentation and reporting.
2012 will also see the emergence of concepts and technology development around areas like Social BI and Social CRM.
Emergence of Mobile Data Presentation
2011 saw the emergence of tablet and sleek computing devices. Last year also saw iPhone being relegated to number two by Samsung Galaxy in many markets across the globe. This trend shows the shifting focus from the very loyal following each of the market segments – whether it is Android or Apple iOS has been commanding over the years. With millions of apps and extensive graphical capabilities, the mobile device is now the biggest source of information for the constantly travelling executive.
2012 will see a consolidation of the mobile based BI offerings. Large enterprise organizations will now provide more BI capabilities on the mobile device apart from just being report utilization device.
Power of Data and hunger for information will see an immense growth
Companies all over the world are becoming data hungry and this trend is expected to grow in the years to come. The changing economic scenarios will need different business models and this in turn will result in a need for different decision-making strategies.
Successful companies today have high investment in analytical models and have reduced thresholds for big scale IT investments that provide them little or no results. Gartner in its study “BI Adoption Trends” indicates that organizations that have business leadership in Business Intelligence have a high adoption of BI. The trend, thus in 2012 will be a change from the traditional reporting by IT from the data generation system to a more collaborative information management system that provides the business users with the power to change decisions based on data.
The trends in 2012 will thus focus on the elusive, faceless customer. The customer who was till now un-reachable will now become increasingly collaborative, sometimes appreciative and at times plain abusive. But his/her power will increase with these interactions and organizations will have to address this thirst for satisfaction, these technologies and business models.
I think that will drive my blogs for the next few years at least!
I welcome your comments and feedback.
