Talking shop - Reaping the benefits of the digital economy

think: act CONTENT

2007

A matter of life or death

Your hand is accepted anywhere in the world as a bona fide credit card. BMW calls itself a software company. Even industrial espionage agents cannot crack your documents. The people at IT smile benignly when asked where the server room is. When a company is taken over in the morning, its systems are fully integrated before everyone goes home in the evening.

A distant future vision? Not really. In essence, some of the above statements are already present reality. Others are well on the way. The daily routine is going digital – just look at Web 2.0 and “Second Life” – and business processes are changing radically as it does so. Information and content that you used to be able to sell for good money now becomes freely available overnight. Suppliers, partners and customers can and must be integrated more deeply in the value chain. Huge volumes of data, and hence large swathes of functions that used to be strictly internal, can be outsourced at will.

Hitherto distinct markets are converging relentlessly. All kinds of things are being “networked”, with all the opportunities and risks that this entails. In this frighteningly fast-paced environment, quickly spotting the strategic importance of developments in the IT industry is quite literally a matter of corporate life or death. In numerous studies and strategy projects, we have applied ourselves to answering two pivotal questions: What technology trends will have the greatest impact on enterprises in the years ahead? And how will these trends change processes, business models and markets? We would like to share with you what we have found: five strategic dimensions of growth whose profound importance cuts straight across every industry and market.