6 Trends Driving Digital Power to Supply Chain Enterprises

We have moved past the point where businesses can consider just exploring digital to a situation today where digital must be considered a core competency in businesses of all sizes and across industries: “Every business is a digital business” as we say.

For business leaders everywhere, the next three years will be about determining their organization’s pace in this digital race—and their place in the new world of digital.

Accenture’s 2014 Technology Vision research, in which they outline their predictions on what technologies will significantly impact businesses, shows that for some time the pace of innovation has been driven by digital start-ups that have disrupted countless industries.

While these companies will still exist and continue to make waves, Accenture believes the time has come for large enterprises to expand their digital conversation and ambition. More and more large organizations are actively leading the digital charge. Instead of being pressured by it, or taking a fast-follower approach, they are beginning to leverage their vast resources and capital not only to react to technology disruption but also to embrace it. A shift “From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter”.

6 Emerging Digital Trends
All businesses, from the Fortune 500 to small businesses, are facing a pressing need to re-examine their capabilities in light of the next stages of their digital journey and to become a Digital Disrupter. Accenture’s Technology Vision can help guide this journey by presenting the important trends and themes that will impact businesses in the future.

The Technology Vision 2014 report highlights these six themes that reflect the shifts taking place among the digital power brokers of tomorrow:

1. The Digital-Physical Blur: The physical world is coming online as objects, devices, and machines acquire more digital intelligence. What’s emerging is more than just an “Internet of Things”; it’s a new layer of connected intelligence into our lives, increasing our insight into and control over the tangible world.
2. From Workforce to Crowdsource: Cloud, social, and collaboration technologies now allow enterprises to tap into vast pools of resources across the world, creating a workforce that extends beyond their employees: one that consists of any user connected to the Internet.
3. Data Supply Chain: Data technologies are evolving rapidly, and to truly unlock its value, companies must start treating data more as a supply chain, enabling it to flow easily and usefully through the entire organization
4. Harnessing Hyperscale: The hardware world is again a hotbed of new development as demand soars for bigger, faster, lower-cost data centers. In this new world, hardware matters more than ever in transforming enterprises into digital businesses with access to unlimited computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.
5. Business of Applications: As large enterprises push for greater IT agility, there is a sharp shift toward simpler, more modular, and more custom apps. IT leaders must soon decide not just who plays what application development role in their new digital organizations but also how to transform the nature of application development itself.
6. Architecting Resilience: In the digital era, the need for “always-on” IT infrastructure, security, and resilient practices can mean the difference between business as usual and erosion of brand value. IT must adopt a new mindset to ensure that systems are not just designed to spec but designed for resilience under failure and attack.

The opportunity for every C-suite executive is to be a digital disrupter – to recreate and redefine the business to create lasting competitive advantage. The potential for growth is limited only by the creativity of the enterprise itself. Now is the time to stop thinking about being disrupted by digital technology and start using it to become a disrupter.

In many ways, digital is fostering a renaissance for large companies, allowing them to reconnect with what made them industry leaders in the first place. The opportunity is there; what’s stopping you from taking it?

Source: Accenture Blogpodium