Data is the New Oil

The 2011 MLOVE ConFestival is a three day gathering of global mobile industry executives, entrepreneurs and developers to discuss the future of mobile technology. The report attached below summarizes key findings.

Insights include:

Worldwide spending on mobile advertising is predicted to be USD $3.3 billion in 2011 then sky rocket to USD $20.6 billion in 2015, driven by search ads and local ads.

Location is everything in retail and now location is in your pocket. It is on your phone. And people still use the opinions of their peers to make decisions about the products they want to buy. The journeys of consumers are no longer linear. They can begin at any time, and companies need to adapt and prepare.

Closer and more profitable consumer relationships are made possible by innovative usage of mobile channels.

Mobile may improve information and service to both partners and customers.

Personalizing digital relationships and experiences is key in today’s marketing strategies. Mobile apps can help do this, especially when one considers the average smartphone user has 30 apps on their phone, 9 of which they have used within the past month.  Just think of the marketing possibilities.

Mobile technology connects three times as many people as landlines.

Mobile is about one thing: Communication. Whether its how we communicate with our friends & family, or how brands communicate their product, communication is at the heart of each & every marketing (and mobile) endeavor.

Mobile Business Intelligence (BI)

As users move through their day buying products, “checking-in,” using wi-fi and the like, thousands of data points are being transmitted. Those data points can then be aggregated to target marketing pushes based on the known interests of the consumer, also known as behavioral advertising -- preference data collected is paired with user identifying data then correlated to make suggestions.

Future Consumers

Mobile technology is already altering the way we learn. In many parts of the world today, a young child may grow up in a touch-screen reality.

Teenagers use social networks, Chats, SMS and Mails to share their thoughts, dreams and wishes with their best friends. Most teenagers are Smartphone owners.

Today’s mobile phones are more powerful than the computers used by NASA in 1969.

See: http://bit.ly/nQpvyb; http://bit.ly/3DUNju

Key predictions:

• Workforce mobility: office is a virtual concept
• Internal IT becomes an internal cloud
• IT becomes a services broker
• IT will become a function of the business

According to Gartner:

1. The concept of ‘work’ as a fixed location becomes obsolete. "With the advent of networking and tablets, smartphones and other computing devices that people can carry with them, work is where the worker is. The work environment for individuals using information today can be at home, in the field or on a forklift. The desk bound office dweller is a dying breed and this shift can be difficult for Information Technology (IT) organizations to support.”

2. Internal IT becomes an internal cloud. Demand for on-demand service experience. "It will require IT to emulate or “start to think like” external cloud providers. IT will have to figure out chargeback and self-service provisioning; above all, it will have to start to develop a services catalog. IT also will have to figure out how to get the most out of a shared services model in such areas as capacity management in a virtualized environment. In terms of security, IT will need to nail down identity management, among many other security responsibilities."

3. IT becomes a services broker. "This puts IT into the position of showing the business which applications and data make sense in-house or with a cloud provider, and how to vet the providers on behalf of the business."

"In a few years, the cloud will no longer referred to as the cloud, because it’s just the way IT services are provisioned. Cloud computing, or rather, hybrid computing is the new term to reflect that many enterprises will build an internal or private cloud that integrates and shares services with public cloud providers. The hybrid approach will prevail, given that enterprises will not let certain data or applications live on a public cloud, for many reasons including regulatory compliance. Enterprises recognize the need to move commodity services and apps, as well as infrastructure, to the public realm to cut costs and gain scalability and agility."

"Critical questions include these: Does the provider let you know if and when access attempts are made on your data that they house? Does the cloud provider allow you to perform security audits on it? What are the migration path options to another provider? Who will build the back-end connections from your data in the cloud to other applications in your organization or to data housed by another cloud provider?"

4. IT will become a function of the business. Today,  IT is mostly considered separate from the business. In the future IT will be considered a service or function within the business.

Gartner claims:

• Code-writing will become less important, and infrastructure and application integration more important within the enterprise and with external providers.
• Enterprises may start to emulate the business models developing in other countries in which a business function or even an entire business can be built for a specific purpose in a virtualized or cloud environment, then torn down once the project or purpose is complete.
• Application portfolios, as well as how and why applications are developed, will be led by your customers and their mobile, on-demand, “anywhere” needs.
• Enterprise IT will struggle with managing the blurred lines between corporate and personal personas, as well as the data and devices tied to those personas.

Maybe so. At Rose, the future is now.

Yet in the mid-term and long-term future new technologies will likely change the game again making today's predictions obsolete.

Further, business today is highly specialized and require customized tech solutions. Gartner's future is likely for some organizations and is happening today. Others have a very different IT future.