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Computer Weekly - 10 January 2012: What’s in store for IT this year?
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Technology industry at the cross-roads: Transforming quote-to-cash operations
This report from PwC, highlights the urgency for technology companies to reinvent their existing operating models to meet the fast-changing buying process, sales cycles and customer demands driven by the proliferation of mobile, social and the cloud.
Customer experience is being shaped by the likes of Apple, Amazon and eBay, which tracks consumers wherever they enter the browse/buy/use cycle, identify their purchase history and buying patterns and tailor their offerings accordingly.
To compete in this new reality, PwC has defined the ‘quote to cash’ operations model – a necessary transformation for tech companies of their existing business and operating models.
The report outlines the roadmap for companies to transform their quote to cash operations (which touches every function of a company) and provides a benchmark of the performance spectrum of leaders, laggards and the mainstream.
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The changing mobile platform landscape
So while there will inevitably be heated debates over which mobile platform is better, or which one to develop for first, the real opportunity comes when the discussion moves above the hardware to how an app can derive value by connecting to different business platforms and ecosystems. Find out more in this eguide.
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Mobile application platforms: Essential guide
One of the mantras of modern enterprise application development is that business applications should be as easy to use as mass market consumer applications. This is particularly relevant on smartphones where employees access consumer apps and enterprise apps on the same device.
Increasingly apps must be one step ahead of the user, pulling in context-specific information and providing a seamless user experience.
The enterprise can no longer assume that everyone will use just one device. The apps must support the fast changing mobile device market, in other words different hardware capabilities and different versions of operating system software. Mobile platforms help enterprises separate the complexities of supporting multiple permutations of devices to provide a core set of cross-platform functions apps can use.
The emergence of mobile back-end as a service offerings takes this a step further, offering these capabilities as a cloud service.
Beyond apps development, artificial intelligence technology is evolving all the time, and AI-powered voice-assisted search technology such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant is seen by many industry watchers as representative of a major change in how people interact with smartphones.
Experts believe the future of mobile apps is to add intelligence to enhance the user experience. This so-called assistant technology is able to read email correspondence and understand what the user searches for on the web. For instance, Microsoft is looking at integrating its Cortana technology into office productivity. In the future, such technology could be used to understand a Skype call or gather useful information in a Word document.
The demands of mobile apps bring new challenges around architecture, agility and integration. In this guide, we examine the issues around mobile applications and the platforms emerging to help developers.
