Keep Up With Technology or Die (Metaphorically, Of Course)
Summary: In the near future, customers will generate most new product or service ideas.
Doc likes to keep up with the latest and greatest, but I’m not obsessed by it. Seems I might be if I was running a business. Business leaders are expecting wrenching change to their industry sectors in the future, due to the impacts of technology, according to the latest executive summary by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The research, set for full release in March 2012, reveals more than one third (37 percent) of leaders surveyed believe their organization will be unable to keep up with technology and they will lose their competitive edge. One third of IT industry leaders believe their businesses will disappear altogether, while six out of ten survey respondents believe the markets where they operate will be significantly altered between now and 2020, bearing little similarity to today.
Business structures are also likely to change - 63 percent predict a shift to decentralized structures with a far-reaching devolution of business decision-making authority move to the periphery of organizations. Adding to this, they believe that customers will generate almost as many new ideas for the improvement of business processes as employees. And by 2020, customers will generate the most new product or service ideas.
In addition, 59 percent of those surveyed agree that the concept of non-digital information will be utterly foreign to most employees by 2020.
The research, undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Ricoh, is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the impact of technology on the future workplace, and was developed through dedicated interviews with 567 senior business leaders across the globe within 20 sectors. Forty-six percent of respondents hold C-suite positions, with 43 percent earning annual revenues of US$500 million or more.
The executive summary can be downloaded here. Doc is not surprised to learn that employees and customers are the best sources of new business ideas – those are the folks on the front lines. But non-digital information being “utterly foreign” to employees? Not so convinced on that point. Won’t people be talking to each other in 2020?
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ZDNet introduces Doc (The DocuMentor), sponsored by RICOH. Through his blog, Doc will educate you about Document Management. So who is Doc? Doc is something of an enigma. He was born to a Russian ballerina and a German electrical engineer who some believe was running covert operations for shadowy corporate interests. Doc grew up in various locations in the United States, although no one seems to know precisely where, least of all Doc. His early schooling was unremarkable except for the time he was caught trying to replace all the mimeograph machines with high-tech color copiers that had mysteriously disappeared from a shipment to Albania. At MIT, he made a name for himself by transforming a large printer into a robot that hunts and eats Roombas. Professionally, he reportedly has seen the insides of more brands, versions, and generations of printer and printer-related hardware than almost anyone. Some say his obsession with paper, printing, and mechanical movement was either started by, or evidenced by, a traumatic childhood episode when he crawled inside an old Xerox 2400 and tried to print himself.
Anyway, Doc has hands on experience with stuff like printer maintenance and fleet management, but his mastery of document management leaves no stone unturned. Important issues like sustainability, security, and regulatory compliance are top of mind for Doc, as are other business technology needs like networking and IT services, making him a true blue IT renaissance man.
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