Through their work and research McKinsey have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

1.Distributing cocreation: 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 increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit.

3.Tapping into a world of talent. Technology permits organizations to decentralize innovation through networks or customers.

4.Extracting more value from interactions: Technology tools such as wikis, virtual team environments, etc., may create ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions.

5.Expanding the frontiers of automation: Exchanged information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities.

6.Unbundling production from delivery. Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components.

7.Putting more science into management. Technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights from growing tools of rich data.

8.Making businesses from information: Accumulated pools of data captured or pulled together from many points of origin are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

For anyone aware of what is happening around us, most of these items may not come as a revelation, still in the way McKinsey has put these together and found examples to match it makes inspiring reading...

Attachments:

5._Eight_business_tech_trends_to_watch_(McKinsey,_2008)[1].pdf

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