Gartner: IT-Verantwortliche sollten sich auf die dritte Welle der Innovation vorbereiten, um Wachstum zu fördern

“We have reached a point where technology is delivering power to the people, not just the organisation,” Mr. Bradley said. “This revolution is the socialisation of IT.”

Never before has IT enabled thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people to create simultaneously and collaboratively. The creation of business content has undergone a significant evolution to arrive at socialisation. Many companies are leveraging social networks in connecting employees globally to enhance internal collaboration.

“Mass collaboration requires a new mindset,” Mr. Bradley said. “It is your organisation’s competency in tapping into the power of communities that will determine its future greatness.”

CRM is morphing into customer involvement mobilisation with emerging social applications such as idea exchanges, prediction markets, crowd-sourcing models, community-driven self-service, and customer-driven product design.

During the industrial revolution the ability to deliver a wide range of goods and services at a reduced price made them available to everyone. “It was only a matter of time before shared IT services gained significant penetration to foster dramatic shifts in the IT industry,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Combine this with the impact of socialisation and collaborative computing models and the door opens for clean-slate competitors to enter every market. The industrialisation of IT is upon us.”

Because of industrialised IT, everything and anything will become a service. It is called cloud computing. Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enable capabilities are provided “as a service” to multiple customers using Internet technologies.

“Cloud” will be a grand buzzword unifier in IT for the next 12 months. Utility computing, grid computing, software as a service, and many other scalable remote computing models will get linked to cloud computing.

Mr. Plummer said cloud computing is actually the wrong buzz phrase. He said people should be talking about cloud business instead. “Technology vendors will deliver cloud infrastructure, but those details must be linked for us all, or ‘the cloud’ will just be nothing more than a buzz-word,” Mr. Plummer said. “We can’t spend all of our time arguing about how to implement the cloud and almost no time talking about whether our business can fit the cloud model.”

IT organisations will need to determine what their strategy about the cloud that will allow them to help their business innovate into new models of revenue-generation.

Advancing the capability of the IT department means taking some calculated risks. The business needs IT departments to advance two capabilities.

The first opportunity is in strategic information management. “Gartner’s annual business executive survey with Forbes magazine showed that chief executives’ biggest expectation of IT is not productivity. It’s developing the capability to use information as a competitive weapon,” said Mary Mesaglio, research director for Gartner Executive Programs. “It’s not enough to own the information. You need to use it to get competitive advantage.”

The second opportunity is what Gartner calls operational technology. Integrating IT’s administrative systems with the operational technology in their organisation is a green field of opportunity for IT.

“The new truth is that you (IT leaders) have to innovate and decide how to bring IT to bear on big new business problems that need systematic solutions,” Ms. Mesaglio said. “Sure the major vendors will provide you with a toolset from piece parts using service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), and software as a service (SaaS), but you need to provide the solution. The clock is ticking for those who still believe excellence in technology management alone will work.”

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