Top Technology Trends in 2012

Industry experts identify the 2012 trends that will affect the way companies do business—and technology strategies that can help them gain advantage over the competition.

Every new year is an opportunity to reflect, and to plan a course of action for success in the months ahead. With that in mind, Profit Online asked a group of technology experts, both within and outside of Oracle, to list the top trends they’re seeing for 2012 in their field or industry of expertise. What are the most important trends to track in the coming year? What IT strategies can help you stay ahead?

By understanding trends, on both a micro- and a macro-level, organizations and professionals can practice proactive decision-making and gain advantage over the competition. Here are some of the top industry trends that will affect business and technology decisions in the next year, according to our industry experts. (And stay tuned — Profit Online will be publishing the full articles of the excerpts below over the next few weeks.)

Technology Careers

“Companies have a low risk tolerance for hiring individuals, only to lay them off again. The solution, therefore, is to do more with less. This has caused a new trend that I call ‘executive or professional convergence.’ Just as there has been technological convergence over time, executive or professional convergence is the desire of companies to combine what traditionally were two or three top roles into one…. Those who have only worked in one industry or in one functional role need to break out of their functional box rather than relying on progressive skills along a single role or function. Now is the time to understand how your deep and wide experience applies in today’s world.”
—Karen Armon, executive-level career coach, “Three Major Trends for Technology Professionals in 2012”

Learn more:
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Aerospace and Defense

“A&D companies can redirect their existing knowledge and technologies toward new uses—within both the Department of Defense and the private sector. This requires a new network of change agents within an organization who can look beyond the traditional applications and customer segments to identify new markets for the next generation of their core competences.”
—Sasha Banks, senior director of manufacturing industry strategy & marketing at Oracle.

Learn more:
Special Report: The Global Workforce
 

Engineering and Construction

“Understanding which projects to bid on and increasing win rates is essential to reducing risk and increasing profits. In order to be successful, a better understanding of an owner’s requirements, vision and timetable, as well as the construction company’s own history of dealing with the potential client, could be a key to success. Tools to track bid history, client information, and previous estimates for similar work can be utilized to gain a greater understanding of how to proceed.”
—Scott Bartlett, senior director of engineering & construction industry strategy & marketing at Oracle.

Learn more:
Five Ideas: Project Management
 

Manufacturing

“As competition intensifies, customer preferences change, asset life extends, and technology evolves, leading manufacturers and service companies are aggressively seeking new ways to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers. With value-added services and bundled service-with-product solutions, manufacturers and service companies are also realizing new, recurring and profitable revenue streams that not only augment new product sales, but enrich the customer experience throughout the entire ownership lifecycle.”
—Sasha Banks, senior director of manufacturing industry strategy & marketing at Oracle.

Learn more:
Special Report: Taking Care of Customers
 

Consumer Goods

“There is an increasing drive to engage with and potentially sell to evolving consumers across channels. Consequently, consumer goods manufacturers need to adapt much like retailers have, with investments in innovative technologies and processes to build the infrastructure to support the market demand. With advances in social networking, digital marketing and mobility fundamentally changing the way consumers behave, the door has opened to building a more direct relationship with customers.”
—Cassandra Moren, senior director of consumer goods industry strategy & marketing at Oracle.

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Oil and Gas

“Increasing data volumes across traditional and new data types have created the well-known data explosion facing petro-scientists. In addition, real-time drilling, completion and production data are overwhelming companies’ operational ability to analyze and execute on business plans. Managing these data along with unstructured and transactional business data is increasingly difficult. In 2012 and beyond, E&P, drilling and service companies will be applying analytics to data from sensors, mobile devices, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems to optimize asset management processes and move decision-making toward real-time, thereby enabling operators to identify problems before breakdowns and disasters occur.”
—Charles Karren, senior director of oil & gas industry strategy & marketing at Oracle.

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Asian Finance

“2011 was a year of major disasters in Japan, with a major earthquake and subsequent nuclear accident. This situation has increased awareness of risks among financial institutions in Japan and neighboring countries. Many came to the realization that existing preparedness for business risks and contingency plans are far less adequate than expected. For example, insurance group Munich Re reports on natural disaster risks rank Tokyo as the worst in the world, followed by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Osaka, and other major cities in Asia and the U.S. This will have much impact on where the financial institutions should locate their operations, how to estimate the risks of their clients and provide the best advice, and the details of their foreign currency strategy.”
—Qunio Takashima, director of Industry strategy & Insight at Oracle.

Learn more:
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Logistics

“The logistics industry will be affected by two emerging trends in 2012: mobility and the data deluge. In the era of mobility, we have entered an era of unprecedented levels of real-time data visibility... As a result, 2012 will see the true emergence of “big data” — the deluge of near real-time data that businesses are collecting through a variety of data sources. IT companies will help their clients deal with this massive amount of new data by introducing new hardware appliances and software tools that allow companies to process and analyze the data deluge. The broader market will recognize what IT savvy companies already know: With the right infrastructure to process and analyze this data, companies can equip executives and operations personnel to spot trends and make better real-time decisions.”
—Sundar Swaminathan, senior director of travel and transportation industry strategy & marketing.

Learn more:
Special Report: Dealing with Data
Taming the Data Deluge
 

Tech Design

“In 2012, brands that consistently fuse design innovation with utility will move to the front of the line. Expect to see these trends illustrated through responsive web design, optimized social media engagement, time-saving applications, and digital tools that answer lifestyle dilemmas. The consumer voice will become more and more potent as brands hone in on how best to gain attention. As such, brand strategies will be data-driven, with female consumer behavior traits guiding them to blend enchantment and utility based on chosen life stages, and not on a traditional niche…. In essence, 2012 will be the year brands deliver more value and less hype.”
—Ayesha Mathews-Wadhwa, founder and creative director of PixInk, a San Francisco-based digital design microagency.

Learn more:
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