Predictions: Driving enterprise leaders and innovation in 2016

Enterprise innovation is more than just ideas. It needs to be combined with data, design and a culture willing to adopt it for companies to truly deliver exceptional customer experiences. There has never before been more opportunity for organizations to achieve measurable and dramatic results, and I predict several critical trends over the coming year that will determine leaders and laggards in the evolving enterprise IT space:

Move up the analytics maturity scale

Today, companies aren’t simply analyzing data — they’re integrating different data sources, like predictive and prescriptive intelligence tools, to speed up their ability to mine huge data sets and uncover new insights. The best companies are thinking about analytics beyond charts and graphs; they’re seeing analytics as a story, a conversation, and a collaboration to arm employees with action-based insights that help them make smarter day-to-day decisions.

Choose mobile personalization over mobile saturation

Employees say it’s easier to do their jobs when they can access work remotely from a mobile device. Mobile reinvention of the most time-consuming tasks is one of the best ways to improve the employee experience, but it’s no longer about putting an app for everything on your mobile device. Commit to mobile app personalization over mobile app saturation to drive higher adoption of tools and customer engagement in the field.

The power of communities will escalate

By 2018, Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will create one million jobs and generate $272 billion in GDP impact worldwide. Because of this influx of IT innovation, skilled people, and increasing knowledge, companies will naturally turn to communities, as they are the easiest way to share and distribute vast amounts of information. Communities will house robust and actionable customer data that will foster internal collaboration, drive engagement, and increase sales.

Companies win with gender diversity in the workplace

Gender equality isn’t a plus. It’s a business imperative. Enterprises cannot make decisions that positively impact the entire organization, and those of their customers, if only a subset of that population is involved in the decision-making. If companies want to become truly customer-focused, they need balanced representation within their own organizations. Diversity of experience drives a higher level of business performance and ingenuity, and including women’s unique experiences and viewpoints will enrich an organization’s strategic initiatives and increase employee engagement.

Cloud conversion is legacy tech consultants’ road to survival

As the cloud ecosystem grows, there is a huge need for new digital workers to keep up with the pace of innovation, and traditional tech consultants are the key to alleviating cloud resource constraints. But many of these resources are locked in shrinking legacy and on-premise economies; they must be converted to digital and cloud environments in order for their value — to deliver solutions that drive customer acquisition, retention, and engagement — to continue.