Monumental shifts are redefining the way in which organisations succeed.
So said Mike Vincent, director of Deloitte Consulting, in a keynote address during the CSSA President's Awards ceremony, in Johannesburg, yesterday.
"We live in a world of tumultuous change," he said. "The future isn't the place that it used to be. With understanding, you can design and create your own future. We're all going to spend the rest of our lives in the future, and none of us will get out alive."
He also noted that enterprise competition is shifting. "Time has definitely sped up thanks to technology. With increased complexity and exabytes of information, a light human touch is required."
According to Vincent, most enterprises are currently focusing on controlling assets as well as cost reduction. However, he believes the future enterprise will focus on "variabilising" non-core assets to lower costs and increase flexibility.
"Currently, enterprises measure their pace of change within months or weeks, but in future, significant events will happen in hours, minutes or seconds," he added.
While today's enterprise is characterised by human actors with labour-intense processes and decisions, in future, there will be light human touch, data or act-based automated processes and decisions, Vincent added.
Today's enterprise makes use of reactive, post-transaction business intelligence, but in future, predictive, real-time analytics will be used, Vincent believes.
Among the other trends, he also noted that although most enterprises' operations are currently efficient and optimised, in time they will be flexible, effective and also involve social interactions.
"Many current enterprises are also characterised by data overload, which is opaque and transactional, but in future, I believe it will be information-rich, collaborative, transparent and continuous."
He also noted that enterprises have been riding a wave of change dating from the days of mainframe computers (1956 to 1979), to personal computers (1979 to 1991), to networked computers (1991 to 2001), to the current days of "IT everywhere".
"The current organisation is characterised by ubiquitous computing as well as increased reliance on IT. We also see the boundaries being blurred between work and home; everything is mobile, connected, immediate and interactive; decisions are made immediately and enterprises extend well beyond traditional boundaries."
Share