Top Ten Business Predictions for 2011

It’s the time of year for bold and brazen predictions, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon with my forecast of the Top 10 trends, priorities and events of 2011:

10. Social media will keep dominating the business conversation, following the same evolution e-commerce did as it became e-business. Soon we’ll just call it “social business.”

9. The CIO-CMO relationship will change for the better, growing closer and more collaborative. Instead of confrontational relationships, CIOs and CMOs will find common ground around customer engagement.

8. Cloud will move from an overhyped theory to an adopted practice in mainstream business. Private, public or hybrid clouds, when applied to the right business need, will be game-changing in some industries.

7. Mobile moves aggressively into the data and applications arena as enterprises leverage these devices to empower the workforce, speed decision making and grow top-line revenue.

6. Real-time analytics will define and drive the real-time organization. As analytics is layered onto the megatrends of cloud, mobile and social, its capacity to create real-time businesses becomes closer than it appears.

5. Security breaches will hit an all-time high as data keeps getting pushed beyond the enterprise walls.

4. A battle will break out between IT and the lines of business over who really owns the user interface. Who will own that “last mile” to the customer?

3. CIOs will continue evolving beyond an operational focus, spending more time transforming business processes and setting strategy.

2. Vendor consolidations will cause major support issues at your organizations and IT vendors will need to reinforce and extend their commitments to you.

1. CIO turnover will increase if businesses can’t scale. More of your energies will be spent reducing cycle times and helping your organizations increase revenue instead of cutting costs.

So, what did I miss? What are you seeing that I’m not? I welcome your thoughts, as always, and thank you for being a loyal reader of CIO.

Onward to 2011!

Contact Michael Friedenberg, President and CEO of IDG Enterprise, at mfriedenberg@cio.com.