New Technology Trends for 2008 from Mckinsey & Company

Cnet.com, the popular website that covers a wide range of technology topics, just published an instructive report on 2008 Technology Trends authored by Mckinsey & Company the consulting firm that serves 70% of the fortune 500 hundred companies.

The report discuss and supports a concept that we at SWK embrace, "Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business."

"Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years."

The trends are divided into two categories, Managing Relationships and Managing capital and assets. The ideas apply to both small and large businesses and can be accomplished with products like Sage MAS 90, 200 ERP or MAS 500, Sage CRM, and the many specialized solutions that work with MAS like Job Ops, Ascent Automated Services, BASC Automated Rental Management, Acellos WMS, and many others.

You can read the full reports Here, Cnet.com or Here, Mckinsey.com

Highlights of the study includes:

"A number of new and emerging technologies, many aimed at enhancing the way the Internet is used, promise to change how companies innovate, managers make decisions, and businesses lower costs, tap talent, or realize new business opportunities. Although technology always promises benefits, actually gaining them requires a good understanding of its real business implications and of the concomitant managerial changes. Over the next decade, eight technology-enabled business trends will really matter. Smart managers should start doing their homework now."

Managing relationships

1. Distributing co-creation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also co-create with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.

3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities.

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites.

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever smaller increments cost-effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models.

8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Feel free to comment below. We are excited about the many opportunities that exist in the year ahead."

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