The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade: consumerization, and big data:

Mobile, social, cloud,

In todays ever more technology-centric world, the stodgy IT department isnt considered the home of innovation and business leadership. Yet that might have to change as some of the biggest advances in the history of technology make their way into the front lines of service delivery. Heres an exploration of the top five IT trends in the next half decade, including some of the latest industry data. 1) Next-Gen Mobile - Smart Devices and Tablets Its obvious to the casual observer these days that smart mobile devices based on iOS, Android, and even Blackberry OS/QNX are seeing widespread use. But comparing projected worldwide sales of tablets and PCs tells an even more dramatic story. Using the latest sales projections from Gartner on tablets and current PC shipment estimates from IDC, we can see that by 2015 the tablet market will be 479 million units and the PC market will be only just ahead at 535 million units. This means tablets alone are going to have effective parity with PCs in just 3 years. 2) Social Media - Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 While mobile phones technically have a broader reach than any communications device, social media has already surpassed that workhorse of the modern enterprise, email. Increasingly, the world is using social networks and other social media-based services to stay in touch, communicate, and collaborate. Now key aspects of the CRM process are being overhauled to reflect a fundamentally social world and expecting to see stellar growth in the next year. As Salesforces Marc Benioff was very clear in his dramatic keynote at Dreamforce last month, leading organizations are becoming social enterprises. There now seems to be hard data to confirm this view: McKinsey and Company is reporting that the revenue growth of social businesses is 24% higher than less social firms and data from Frost and Sullivan backs that up across various KPIs. The message is that companies are going to and have every reason to be using social media as a primary channel in the very near future, if they arent already. Its time to get strategic.

Related: Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media 3) Cloud computing Of all the technology trends on this list, cloud computing is one of the more interesting and in my opinion, now least controversial. While there are far more reasons to adopt cloud technologies than just cost reduction, according to Mike Vizard perceptions of performance issues and lack of visibility into the stack remain one of the top issues for large enterprises. Yet, among the large enterprise CTO and CIOs I speak with, cloud computing is being adopted steadily for non-mission critical applications and some are now even beginning to downsize their data centers. Business agility, vendor choice, and access to next-generation architectures are all benefits of employing the latest cloud computing

architectures, which are often radically advanced compared to their traditional enterprise brethren. 4) Consumerization of IT Ive previously made the point that the source of innovation for technology is coming largely from the consumer world, which also sets the pace. Yet thats just one aspect of consumerization, which some like myself and Ray Wang are calling CoIT for short. Consumerization also very much has to do with its usage model, which eschews enterprise complexity for extreme usability and radically low barriers to participation. Enterprises which dont steadily consumerize their application portfolios are in for even lower levels of adoption and usage than they already have as workers continue to route around them for easier and more productive solutions. Another decentralized and scalable solution is, as with next-gen mobile, to help workers help themselves to third party apps that are deemed safe and secure.

5) Big data Businesses are drowning in data more than ever before, yet have surprisingly little access to it. In turn, business cycles are growing shorter and shorter, making it necessary to see the stream of new and existing business data and process it quickly enough to make critical decisions. The term big data was coined to describe new technologies and techniques that can handle an order of magnitude or two more data than enterprises are today, something existing RDBMS technology cant do it in a scalable manner or costeffectively. Big data offers the promise of better ROI on valuable enterprise datasets while being able to tackle entirely new business problems that were previously impossible to solve with existing techniques. While most companies are still addressing their big data needs with data warehousing, according to Loraine Lawson, one need only scan the impressive McKinsey report on Big Data to see the major opportunities it offers on the business side.