Riding the Trend Wave
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Accenture have a great article on global trends in the May 2006 edition of their journal Outlook, called Making the Trend Your Friend. Predicting the future, according to the article, is the easy part. (Not sure if I agree with that, but anyway.....) The article lists 10 crucial global trends and the actions that organizations need to take to ride them and so create their own futures.
The 10 trends are:
1. Permanent, Increasingly Pervasive Information Connectivity
Information technology is extending not only its horizontal reach but its vertical reach-delving deeper into patterns of behavior or into operational information, enabling richer knowledge about companies, products and customers. Companies know more about their customers, but customers also know more about companies' products and services.
2. The Ascendancy of Major Emerging Economies
Competitive advantage across industries in the coming years will be determined in large part by the manner in which companies anticipate both the opportunities and the threats of four vital emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India and, especially, China.
3. The Accelerating Pace of Globalization
The pace of globalization and its effects have increased dramatically because of ubiquitous information connectivity. When major business functions, from production to sales, can be performed almost anywhere, it presents companies with unprecedented opportunities for both cost optimization and brand extension.
4. Rapidly Changing Demographics
In both industrialized nations and emerging economies, a large percentage of the workforce will soon retire, resulting in the loss of critical knowledge and skills. Because of declining fertility rates in many developed nations, retiring workers are not being replaced fast enough, which raises the specter of global shortages of highly skilled labor. The situation is particularly troublesome in the public sector. Meanwhile, huge areas within both rich and poor nations are being hollowed out by the mass movement of populations to urban zones.
5. An Increasingly Complex and Fragile Business Environment
As business solutions and services become more elegant and complex, they also become more fragile and susceptible to business failure and security risks. With ever-larger infrastructures with more components, more things can go wrong. High mobility and extended customer reach increase the possible points of attack for those seeking to breach both information and physical security.
6. Shorter Time Frames for Decision Making
The increasing pace and complexity of business today means managing almost moment to moment, with an eye on both cost optimization and the quality of business performance. But many managers find themselves either unable to access the data needed to inform their decisions fast enough through their legacy IT systems, or overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them.
7. Shrinking Windows of Profitability
The global information network and the transparency of business operations have resulted in less opportunity for an innovative or first-mover product to maintain market dominance. The competition can more rapidly imitate or even leapfrog over products originally seen as innovative. Intellectual property rights are not protected for as long, or are violated more easily. Meanwhile, brand loyalty is declining.
8. Rapidly Changing Industry and Market Boundaries
Falling trade barriers are redefining markets globally, while technology advances and other factors are blurring lines between industries like entertainment and telecommunications. Competing in evolving global markets at today's pace of innovation requires making rapid adjustments to capabilities and scale.
9. A Growing Public Demand for More Corporate Transparency and Better Governance and Accountability
Calls for stricter accounting and reporting standards and more transparency are coming not just from regulators but from employees and shareholders as well. Shareholders are also now routinely pressing companies about their environmental records, hiring and firing practices, fair trade policies and charitable contributions. A number of online business practices have come under public scrutiny as well. Even companies less vulnerable to these possible actions will face an increasing need to conduct themselves in accordance with emerging national and global standards.
10. An Explosion of the Life Sciences Economy
Recent discoveries, including the sequencing of the human genome, advances in information technology, and demographic trends such as aging populations throughout the industrialized world, are stimulating health spending and growth in the life sciences economy, or "bioeconomy."
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