What do you reckon the key trends will be in 2009 ? Here's my take :
Improving
Productivity and Flexibility
The quest for cost reduction, improved productivity and business flexibility will drive demand for
- More
distributed working
2009 will see increasing growth in the use of collaborative working tools (particularly amongst sme’s) eg vastly improved video conferencing at all levels, VoIP, and the move to more web based solutions. This also lets businesses tick the “green” box. - Open Source
Notionally enabling both lower tco and flexibility, interest in open source is likely to continue to grow.
- Partnerships
and alliances – as people accept they shouldn’t do it all. May also
provide access to partners’ sales channel at reduced cost.
Working closer with
customers to meet their needs
- Growth of online sales
Underneath all the doom and gloom of the High Street this is the real success of 2008, and even with a reduction in growth rates online still looks like the place to be in 2009. These websites need specialist web/digital marketing skills, and niche solutions such as peak demand management and competitor tracking tools. - Helping
clients get closer to their customers.
Blogs, wikis and social networking are increasingly being used in mainstream business, and offer a variety of ways of “improving the customer experience”, whether that’s the internal or external customer. - Data Management/Mining
A number of drivers :
Need for improved management information/analytics.
Need for easier access to corporate knowledge.
Growth of “smarter” personalisation – as you get closer to the customer they’ll demand more savvy communications. - Software
as a Service
Much hyped will 2009 be the year for SaaS ?As everyone seeks to contain costs and only pay for what they use, SaaS may become much more acceptable, particularly where vendors make it an easy purchase.
Mobility
- Notebooks
2008 has seen the explosive growth of the iPhone and look alikes and suddenly everyone “gets it” about the advantage of everything on one ultra portable, location aware device. These devices are still too small to do a lot of detailed work and this is likely to further fuel the growth of notebooks – light, sufficiently powerful for “on the move” use - see Acer and Asus, HP and Dell all doing business in this market.
There is huge potential for more mobile applications – see growth of iphone apps, mobile gaming. Location based services – for the same reasons – the “show me “ opportunity of the smart phone, a new generation of games
Regulation/Compliance
- An inevitable reaction to the credit crunch will be new regulation for the Financial Services sector. After Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, some intelligent thinking is needed to really make a difference.
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