A few weeks back we talked about work by Accenture into what it sees as the forces and trends shaping the next wave of ICT and we had an opportunity to delve into a bit more of the findings this week when we spoke to one of the firm’s representatives about the issue of data.
If you recall, the firm’s deep thinkers say that an inversion of the whole way ICT works might be upon us – with us moving away from a software application-centric view of the world to one dominated instead by data:" while app development might be exploding, a world where the data itself becomes the platform will soon be upon us".
"The data deluge gripping the enterprise and consumers alike will signal a marked shift from application specific platforms to the data itself acting as the platform," Gavin Michael, its global managing director for R&D and Alliances, has now told us.
Michael and his team argue that this is a significant shift dovetailing with the pace of innovation in both hardware and software – and that "those who recognize the shift today" will be "in a far better position tomorrow to leverage it successfully across their IT platforms".
What sort of data is being talked about and why should we care about it? Accenture is claiming that, in a note that we keep hearing in current discussions about the place of technology in the social and business infrastructure, it’s all user-generated and also user-valuable – just think, "Apps, apps everywhere".
Smart phone growth is leading to an explosion of data available anytime, all the time, and from anywhere, the cloud is redistributing where and when we can store and access data and the data itself is far more complex and chaotic than it used to be, made up of all those Tweets, blogs, email, video clips, music and digital entertainment banging around our home, corporate and public networks alike, with an increasing proportion either HD, 3D, and complex audio algorithms.
We asked Michael what the action statement is for CIOs in any of this. For him and the other researchers at the consulting giant, the key word is "platform". Thus, "Applications will always be important, but the platform to access them will be more so. As a result, we think, platform architectures will be selected primarily to cope with soaring volumes of data and the complexity of data management, not for their ability to support this or that application."
Perhaps frustratingly, Accenture couldn’t give us many specifics about what such a "platform" would look like, or what technologies it would be built on. Er, apart from we can expect (you knew this one was coming!) "cloud" will be a big part of what we probably end up with.
Which is fair enough; all it’s trying to do is raise an issue here about the role and responsibility of the IT function and how it can best exercise (and maybe maintain?) leadership here.
It also reiterates its warning about what might happen if this challenge isn’t taken up. "CIOs that recognise and adjust for them now will be far more efficient and their data far more secure and accessible," Michael argues. "Data management yesterday was important; today it is competitively critical. IT managers, CTOs and CIOs sceptical of the cloud and new ways to manage mushrooming data run the risk of putting their entire enterprise at risk."
The contention that we’re moving from application to data centric is an interesting stuff and surely worthy of further debate. But it would be even nicer to see what a "data platform" would consist of. Any ideas?
Go here to read the Accenture report in the original.
