Deloitte’s 5th Annual Tech Trends Report, titled Inspiring Disruption, examines the changing landscape of technology and how multiple disruptive technology forces are converging on and impacting business today. The study focuses on the next 18-24 months and is divided into two categories – enablers and disruptors.

Disruptors represent opportunities for technology executives to create sustainable positive changes in IT capabilities, business operations and business models. The current report features: CIO as Venture Capitalist, Cognitive Analytics, Industrialised Crowdsourcing, Digital Engagement and Wearables.

Enablers are technologies in which many organisations have already invested, but new developments and opportunities have inspired new business applications, thereby warranting a fresh look. The current report features: Technical Debt Reversal, Social Activation, Cloud Orchestration, In-memory Revolution and Real-time DevOps.

With detailed case studies and a section titled “Lessons from the front lines”, the report provides an in-depth look at the latest technology developments that have the potential to impact the complex nature of today’s business challenges. The report highlights examples of organisations putting the trends to work. It also features a “My Take” for each chapter, including an external perspective from a client executive, academic, or industry.

This year, in collaboration with Singularity University, the Technology Trends research also added a section on Exponential Technologies. The fields highlighted have far-reaching, transformative impact and represent the elemental advances that have formed technology trends both this year and in the past. Five exponentials with wide-ranging impact across geographies and industries were featured: artificial intelligence, robotics, cyber security, additive manufacturing and advanced computing. The report provides a high-level introduction to each exponential—a snapshot of what it is, where it comes from and where it is going.

Example of trends that Inspire Disruption includes:

• CIO as venture capitalist - CIOs who want to help drive business growth and innovation will likely need to develop a new mindset and new capabilities. Like venture capitalists, CIOs should actively manage their IT portfolio in a way that drives enterprise value and evaluate portfolio performance in terms that business leaders understand—value, risk and time horizon to reward. CIOs who can combine this with agility and align the desired talent can reshape how they run the business of IT.
• Wearables - Wearable computing has many forms, such as glasses, watches, smart badges and bracelets. The potential is tremendous: hands-free, heads-up technology to reshape how work gets done, how decisions are made and how you engage with employees, customers and partners. Wearables introduce technology to previously prohibitive scenarios where safety, logistics, or even etiquette constrained the usage of laptops and smartphones. While consumer wearables are in the spotlight today, we expect business to drive acceptance and transformative use cases.
• Cloud orchestration - Cloud adoption across the enterprise is a growing reality, but much of the usage is in addition to on-premises systems—not in replacement. As cloud services continue to expand, organisations are increasingly connecting cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core systems—in strings, clusters, storms and more—cobbling together discrete services for an end-to-end business process. Tactical adoption of cloud is giving way to the need for a coordinated, orchestrated strategy—and for a new class of cloud offerings built around business outcomes.
• Social activation - Over the years, the focus of social business has shifted from measuring volume to monitoring sentiment and, now, toward changing perceptions. In today’s recommendation economy, organisations should focus on measuring the perception of their brand and then on changing how people feel, share and evangelise. Organisations can activate their audiences to drive their message outward—handing them an idea and getting them to advocate it in their own words to their own network.

Patrick Laurent, partner at Deloitte Luxembourg, delves deeper into the impact of these trends from a local point of view: “We believe that Luxembourg CIOs are ideally positioned to act as venture capitalists. Indeed, the relatively small size of companies allows the incubation of innovative ideas and models in a lab model – with the capacity to take more risks – which can then be expanded, especially within groups.

We also believe that Luxembourg companies must be present on social media. It is probably even more applicable in Luxembourg where the market is limited in size, hence making the presence on the internet much more important.

A presence on social media, however, is not just passive surveillance, but also the active influence in near real time. If we consider that more and more sales are made on recommendations between consumers, social networks and forums being the privileged media of spreading these recommendations, it appears that to develop a marketing strategy integrating education and empowerment of the public in social channels can lead to lasting results.

Finally, at a time when the Grand Duchy aims to becoming a hub for ICT services, its organisations must ensure the cyber security of their information. Worryingly, with most cyber-attacks and data theft occurring within hours, their detection can take up to several months. It is therefore necessary that the Luxembourg companies anticipate attacks and put in place the necessary safeguards.”

The full Tech Trends 2014 report is available at: http://www.deloitte.com/lu/tech-trends-2014