Eight Business Technology TrendsTo Watch

I recently ran across an article at the McKinsey Quarterly that caught my attention.  The McKinsey Quarterly is a business journal published by McKinsey & Company, a large international strategic business consulting firm.  The McKinsey Quarterly publishes both free (with registration articles) and "premium" (for a fee) articles.  The article that caught my attention is a free article published in December, 2007, entitled "Eight business technology trends to watch" by James Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague.  These McKinsey consultants have identified some trends that we as IT leaders need to be thinking about.  It's a very thought provoking article.  The trends they identify are:

Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation - the Internet offers new ways for people and teams to collaborate in developing new products and services
2. Using consumers as innovators - "crowdsourcing" allows our customers to also be contributors
3. Tapping into a world of talent - it's a big world out there and in the virtual world one with out borders
4. Extracting more value from interactions - technology can help us focus our efforts into more value- added areas and transfer transactional activities to more cost effective solutions

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation - technology has tremendous potential for automating repetitive tasks
6. Unbundling production from delivery - we can use technology to make our fixed assets into reusable components

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management - we now have the ability for data-based decisions more than we've ever had
8. Making businesses from information - "knowledge is power" that can help our business succeed and develop new markets

I'm a few months behind many other reviews of this article so I won't do a detailed review.  For that you may want to take a look at some of the reviews I've listed below.  Instead I'll make a different observation.

When I read this I was struck by how little time we are able to devote to such topics.  We want to be "strategic" but somehow seem to spend all of our time on topics such as:

1. Budgets
2. Project schedule
3. Project resources
4. HelpDesk issues
5. Data center issues
6. Outsourcing decisions
7. Managing consultants
8. Dealing with personnel issues

Take a look at both list of 8 things and ask yourself - "Which list do I spend most of my time on?"  Do you spend any time on things covered in the first list?  Obviously we do have to deal with the day-to-day issues and we do have to balance tactical issues with the strategic.  But for me this was a reminder to make sure I don't let the tactical overwhelm me and crowd out all time for the strategic.  If we do we'll always be playing catch up and finding ourselves reacting rather than leading.

What do you think?

"Death Valley Compass" photo by retro traveler

If you are interested in reading some reviews and opinions on this topic take a look at some of these articles (just some of the results from a Google search)

• Predictions for 2008 ... Eight business technology trends to watch by Christian Smagg
• Tap McKinsey’s Brains for Your 2008 B-Plan by Carleen Hawn
• 8 Business Tech Trends to Watch in 2008 by Christian Sarker
• eight business technology trends to watch at Blaze | work, life & culture
• Putting McKinsey's Business Technology Trends into Practice Part I at Sourcing Innovation
• Eight business technology trends to watch at Adventures in Knowledge