I have enjoyed participating in the FastFoward blog for the four plus years it has been in existence. It have been a great place to meet interesting people and share ideas. At every conference I have met new people who said they were following us on this blog. All good things have their run and now ours is over. I hope you stay in touch with us through our individual blogs. I want to close with a look at an interesting study on the positive impact of Web 2.0. Ironically, the label the most tech savvy people in the study as the tech fast forward group.

Communispace, in partnership with Ogilvy & Mather, recently released findings from a joint research study that examines the impact technology has on the lives of today’s consumer, with a specific focus on the role technology plays on children and  family life in our society. The ‘Tech Fast Forward: Plug in to See the Brighter Side of Life’ study evaluates the optimistic outlook associated with tech-savvy kids and their respective families and draws direct correlations to the resulting implications for marketers and brands.

In two phases of research, they surveyed 1200 US parents with children aged 3–12 in the household and qualitatively explored key topics with 112 tech-savvy community members and their kids. In the first portion they identified 5 segments: tech backward 3%, tech neutral 36%, tech forward 42% , and tech fast forward 19%. Ten they looked more closely the last group. Here is a video of the qualitative portion of the research, including footage from Flip cameras given to participants (children ages 3-12 years old) tasked with recording in-home technology-related behavior.

The vast majority of all segments saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the tech fast forward slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view.   This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share.  The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future.

Some of the key implications identified in the study that enable brands to more effectively connect with and reach the Tech Forward consumer include (mostly in their words with some additional comments):

Mobilize tech optimism: Brands have the opportunity to capitalize on today’s tech optimism by helping consumers create the brighter world they want to see.

Mine the family mindset: As intergenerational attitudes converge, opportunities to market to the family as a unit increase. Purchase decisions are family decisions.

Curate unexpected connections: Brands have the opportunity to bring unimagined access to consumers across the globe and should harness the power of connections in more interesting ways. We like this idea at Darwin.

Put the world to work for you: Technology has unleashed the wisdom of the crowd and brands can build on tech optimism to channel their customers’ creativity.

Respect the mode: Consumers today switch between modes of separation and integration, and seek service and product solutions to help them feel in control.  Brands will benefit by providing a flexible feature set that speaks to the multi-modal life.

Un-connect the dots: Consumers want to interpret your brand—to make your brand’s story their own. So give them the building blocks and let them put the pieces together. I like this one. This is what we do at Darwin, enable people to better connect the dots themselves through content visualizations rather than prescriptive top down search.

Build gated communities: Safety and privacy create major barriers for self-expression online; private communities help consumers feel secure and confident when engaging with your brand online. This is what Communispace does quite well.

Let people mess with your brand: The creative impulse abounds, and today, any and all content is fair game for experimentation, adaptation and reinterpretation. This includes your brand!  Companies need to embrace this trend and enable consumers to reimagine and remix brand assets. I like this one best of all. There is much more in the report that is available for free.

Thanks for reading this blog over the past few years. I hope to stay connected to each of you.

I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise.

Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.

The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times.  I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.

In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.

I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make.  The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means.

Recently, I received a review copy of Business Goes Virtual: Realizing the Value of Collaboration, Social and Virtual Strategies by John P. Girard, Cindy Gordon, and JoAnn L. Girard.  I have known Cindy for some time and we have done work together on several occasions, including several writing efforts so I had high expectations for this work. The book argues that after some false starts, four critical enablers have converged to make virtual business opportunities a reality: social technology, visionary leadership, an increasing recognition of the value of a collaboration culture, plus virtual worlds. They define virtual business as follows: “A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual words.”

The book examines four virtual business strategies that are showing promise. The “any place, any time” strategy provides high quality service 24/7 through bypassing traditional geographic challenges. The “people know best” strategy looks at crowd-sourcing the wisdom of every-day people. The “everyone has a stake” strategy allows organizations to take advantage of their stakeholders’ views. Finally, the “real in the virtual world” strategy enables real businesses to sell their wares in the virtual world.

The book provides case examples and best practices. They look at both successes and failures in this new market and make some bets on the future. They conclude that virtual business is here to stay and firms need to develop a strategy to take advantage of this new market or risk their demise.

One strong example is the transformation from printed books to e-books. I am reading a virtual version of their book now. The authors report that on Christmas Day 2009, consumers purchased more Kindle books than physical books through Amazon, a virtual store itself. Now the iPad is booming with Apple selling more tablets than PCs both in terms of volume and revenue – and the iPad is much cheaper. It takes e-reading to new heights and provides connectivity to so many other possibilities. For example, it becomes that much easier to sharing insights from what you are reading or look up related information from other sources.  Publishers who recognize this trend will be in position to ride the new wave and those that do not will be ridden over.

This new world will change many things including jobs. The authors note that many of the top jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are now faced with preparing our children for jobs that do yet exist and to solve problems that are yet unknown.  This uncertainty has always been the case to some extent but it has become a much stronger factor.  I saw from another source that in 1986 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in workers’ heads but by 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. We need new ways of providing the remaining 81% and the virtual world opens up an opportunity for this also through social software.

Mobile collaboration is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops. The new Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals offers some useful advice on how mobile collaboration requires a new app approach.

We are now living in a work everywhere world. I have noticed that even most small vacation inns have free wifi as a standard offering. Forrester notes that your most productive employees m now use four devices to get work done. This means that “client/server solutions with on-premises servers are inadequate, simply not responsive or agile enough for escalating user requirements and expectations.”

They note that mobile apps need to be designed to run well on any mobile device because of the proliferation of devices. With so many different mobile platforms and form factors to target, app developers will have to organize differently, code differently, and execute differently. In this new environment design skills grow ever-more important (and scarce). There will be new abstraction layers that separate presentation from interaction from back-end services. Teams now must design for mobile first.

Mobile apps must be delivered as a cloud service. Forrester notes that latency is already a problem for distributed organizations and even waiting for email to upload or download to a remote site can be painful. I see this with my iPhone. For me this wait time is mitigated by the fact that I mostly use the iPhone to check for messages when I am killing time. It would be very frustrating in normal use. In addition, access to team sites and even the file system from a hotel room over a virtual private network (VPN) can be excruciatingly slow. Fortunately this is no longer an issue for me but I remember it well. Forrester states that the problem is the lack of capacity, bandwidth, and data close to the device. The solution is cloud suppliers with data centers around the world and points of presence in every major city. The cloud is simply better for delivering good mobile app experiences. I would agree.

Here is another perspective on mobile app creation from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. This session discussed three components that any mobile strategy should have, which includes deciding what goes mobile, understanding how to mobilize applications and services, and designing a framework for managing mobility. On a related note here are some thoughts from the 2011 mLearn Mobile Learning Conference.

State Street Corporation is known for banking and one of the reasons that Boston is a financial services hub on global scale. They are also looking ahead to predict how technology will impact their industry and released its Vision Report. The report,  “The Evolving Role of Technology in Financial Services,” looks at the impact of forthcoming advances in three specific areas: analytics, electronic trading and regulation, as well as portfolio allocation and modeling.

The report looks at the impact that next generation technology such as cloud computing is expected to have on the industry. According to the report, investors will obtain significant benefits through greater automation and capacity on demand, accelerated time to market of innovative new products — including custom analytics and data — greater security and strengthened client service.

It opens with this statement: “Technology has long played a key role in the financial services industry. Today, however, a number of new and rapidly accelerating trends are emerging that promise to usher in an entirely new paradigm. Information technology can no longer simply be an “add on” at the periphery of the business, but rather must be deeply embedded at its core.” It has come a long way from simply counting beans.

State Street’s Vision report also explains that, unlike today, the financial services industry will soon deploy increasingly sophisticated, forward-looking technology tools and analytics that will enable investors to understand and model actual precursors of performance.  For example, instead of today’s simple descriptions related to risk position and market stability, investors will soon be able to see more acute and intricate insights and the actual factors that contribute to those risk positions.  These factors alone, the report states, will have reverberating impacts on the habits, business processes and decision-making of institutional investors around the globe.

The report is divided into three main sections:

Technology with a Purpose: The Next Generation Today section discusses the integration of risk and return technology by investment service providers to address asset managers and asset owners’ growing need for more detailed portfolio analytics, process transparency, risk management and dashboards to improve the speed and kind of information they are receiving and their access to it.

Using Technology to Adapt to the New Regulatory Environment section examines the review of electronic trading by regulators following the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Technology has been at the forefront in enabling the exponential growth of electronic trading and has become the only solution to effectively meet the challenges inherent in new trading regulations.

Portfolio Allocation and Modeling — Look at the question: Technological Arms Race? And explores technology’s solutions to meet today’s leading global asset management challenges, including market crowding, pricing inefficiencies, risk and rebalancing.

The report states the drivers of the changes they cover include several factors. One is clients’ demand for more and faster information, greater transparency, and improved risk management. We can certainly use all of these, especially the last one. Another is that the perceived value of data has fundamentally shifted. This was the theme of several session sat the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference (for example see: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Big Data Analytics for Social Media).

In addition, the globalization of the workforce, which has led to around-the-clock schedules, the acceptance of open source-based strategies and the use of multiple procurement partners, is also an important factor. Taken together, these changes have set the groundwork for the emergence of a new business and IT model that will likely disrupt conventional thinking about the roles and capabilities of IT systems within financial services.

I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms.   It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.

The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”

The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”

I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.

When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.

Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.”  Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.

The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.

They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.

The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.

Here is a recent study that reported digital distractions from Harmon.ie on what has become a major issue at work. It impacts both work and time outside work hours, often blurring the distinction between the two. For example, the majority of people under the age of 40 stay digitally-connected in bed, and 44% of people stay connected during a night out at the movies. Of course many of these connections are for personal reasons, but often work is involved.   In the following result summaries the bullets are in the words of the study. Here are some of the work related findings:

• Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally, either by answering email (48%), answering a mobile phone (35%), chatting via IM (28%), updating their status on a social network (12%) or tweeting (9%).
• Relatively few workers disconnect to focus on a task (32%) or during virtual meetings or teleconferences (30%), webcasts (26%) or lunch (12%).
• A majority of workers turn off their devices only when their boss asks them to (85%) or during one-on-one meetings (63%).

Most of the distractions are digital.

• Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%), personal online activities such as: Facebook (9%), instant messaging (6%), text messaging (5%) and Web search (3%).
• Multiple devices on the desktop contribute to the problem, with 65% of respondents reporting that they utilize up to three additional monitors and/or mobile devices simultaneously with their main computer screen as they work.

Companies have responded with strategies to limit these distractions.

• 68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.
• The #1 corporate strategy used to discourage digital diversion is blocking access to public social networks such as Facebook and/or other non-business websites (48%).

A related, but different, problem is the difficulty in finding content. Respondents reported that they spend an average of 2-1/2 hours per week trying to find the documents needed in multiple local, corporate and cloud repositories.

• The user’s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look. Other locations include the desktop (69%), file server (52%), shared workspace (34%), portable storage device (18%) and/or cloud storage (9%).
• The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.

All of this points to a very disorganized workplace. The very tools that are supposed to help us are actually overwhelming us in some cases.  The solution starts with a unified strategy for digital communication and requires some smart policies, cultural issues and wise implementation of limited number of technologies. I wrote about this recently (see Taking Control of Our Knowledge Consumption and Our Social Presence). I quoted Nick Carr whose new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains address this issue, “companies need to challenge the assumption that employees should always be available. Some people do their best work when they’re disconnected, and companies should create a work culture that encourages it.”  It sounds like they need to actually force many people to disconnect.

Forrester’s TJ Keitt recently released a useful report, Demystifying The Mobile Workforce. This is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops.

In this new research, Forrester defines the five types of information workers based on its data and provides a template for provisioning mobile resources to these employees. Forrester believes that IT can no longer take a one-size-fits-all approach to workforce technologies and must provision mobile and other information technologies based upon workforce segmentation. Instead of force fitting mobile technologies into an overall workforce framework, “ontent and collaboration professionals now must have a mobile-first mindset when designing workplace policies,” according to the report

“The bottom line is that if businesses are to smartly plan for and provision a mobile workforce, they need to have a firm grasp of what the issues are related to these workers, TJ Keitt, wrote in his post on the report, “Anywhere, Anytime” Work Means IT Must Provide The Right Technology, To The Right Person, At The Right Time.

The report provides data to support the five types of information workers and to demonstrate their technology preferences. The five types include: Back-Office Employees comprising 34% of the workforce: Hyper-Mobile Professionals constituting 33% of the workforce, Connected Consultants covering 16% of the workforce, Part-Time Telecommuters comprising 11% of the workforce, and Remote-Based Technicians. Who represent 5% of the workforce.  The report provides a matrix of communication use by each of these five types with some differences.

Each of the types of users require a somewhat different approach. The report suggests that we start by mapping use cases to workers’ responsibilities. Then assess the business process changes needed to encourage adoption as well as tap power users to help drive mobile adoption. You also need to provide training to workers who have not been fast adopters.  It also encourages organizations to streamline the number of devices workers use and, at the same time, extend mobile support to a broader set of workers.

There are a lot of useful suggestions in this report for what is a relatively new field. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference there was a mobile track for the first time.  Here is on example session: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Got Strategy? How to Capitalize on the Mobile Revolution.

If you are in the process of developing a mobile strategy I recommend this report.

I recently spoke with Deb Lavoy, Director of Product Marketing for Digital and Social Media at OpenText, about promoting collaboration and enterprise design in the 21^st century.  She began by noting that we are moving from a mechanistic model for organizations to a more human model. I could not agree more. People are much more than machines and it is time to leave Fred Taylor behind.

Deb mentioned that a key differentiator is employee motivation. I have recently seen research to support her position. For example, a study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. Further research has shown that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.

Deb said that one way to create engagement is with a clear sense of purpose for the organization. This was part of her keynote at the recent Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. She said that in the firms she has worked with she have found one single predictor of success. It is a sense of purpose. Even the best people are not successful without a sense of purpose.

Deb expanded on this is a recent blog post, The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose. She notes that, ”in a purpose driven organization, every conversation, every meeting is infused with “how do we get better at making this important difference” The company is creating value faster than its taking it out of the market. The purpose acts as the primary criteria for decision-making. Without a purpose, there is only the balance sheet and politics… People become competitive, self-protective kingdom builders.” I have certainly seen this dysfunctional behavior many times. I have also seen the power of a shared sense of purpose. Once you experience this you do not want to go back.

Deb went on to discuss three types of collaboration. First there is creative collaboration that is intended to create something. It could be a product team, a legal team, a team responsible for an RFP, or a marketing launch. There is a specific goal in mind and this goal requires more than what an individual can provide. In a blog post on the topic Deb explains that with this type of collaboration, “what we need to do to encourage such collaboration is make it easy for teams to form, communicate, get organized, contribute, aggregate and iterate on work.”

The second type is connective collaboration that “refers to connecting with a broader community – the organization as a whole, or even more broadly than that… The goal of this type of collaboration is to connect dots – find expertise and resources as you need them.” There are different requirements here as connective collaboration “requires a broad, loosely connected community that can maintain awareness of activity, and ideally, technology that helps them find, discover or get pinged about relevant information, resources, insight and expertise - that they may or may not have been aware of – elsewhere in the system.”  This is where monitoring systems and activity streams can create an ambient awareness and help you follow the pulse of the organization.

Third, there is compounding collaboration which is designed is to “ensure that whatever our endeavor, we are leveraging, to the greatest extent possible, the work that has been done already.” This was one of the goals of knowledge management and now we have much better tools for this purpose.  I was involved in a number of these initiatives in the 1990s and wish we had today’s tools at that time.

Deb notes that compounding collaboration is much more than collecting documents. I could not agree more. The documents frequently become out of date as soon as they written, and even when still current, they require a greater context of what people did than is usually recorded.  As Deb notes in old school KM efforts failed because the documentation was separate form the work. I would agree but only add that not all 1990s KM went down this path. All of the successful ones that I observed where process aligned and work centric. The new tools make it easier to be work centric and add the additional dimension of being people centric.

This people centric capability, along with the flexibility of the new social tools, allows the technology to support how people work rather than having people conform to the structure imposed by the technology as we experienced with traditional enterprise apps.

I found that looking at collaboration through these three types is very useful as there are different goals and different uses of tools within each type. Within Enterprise 2.0 all three types need to be supported.

Big Data is a hot topic. I went to a session on Big Data Analytics for Social Media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Computerworld reported on an IDC study that predicts we will see a 50 times increase in the world’s data in the next ten years. In 2011 alone they report that 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created. This is the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years. Then over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world’s data stores will grow by ten times to match the 50 times increase in data. The report adds that IT execs will likely have trouble finding enough people with the skills and experience to manage this increase This is all covered in the fifth annual IDC Digital Universe study.

This data growth is fueled, in part, by the spread of smart devices such as sensors in clothing, medical devices, and structures like buildings and bridges. In addition, unstructured information – such as files, email and video – will account for 90% of all data created over the next decade. Some of this growth is through the rise of high bandwidth data such as videos.

There is some good news as new hardware and software has driven the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. This is likely why servers will only grow ten times while the data they store will grow fifty times. Relative costs have also dropped as since 2005 the annual investments by enterprises in hardware, software and cloud services technologies, along with the staff to manage information, has only increased 50% to $4 trillion.

The cloud accounts for some of the cost reduction and will account for more going forward. Today, cloud computing accounts for only 2% of all IT spending. However, by 2015, though, close to 20% of all information will be attached to cloud services some way, and as much as 10% will reside in a cloud infrastructure, IDC stated.

According to David Reinsel, IDC’s vice president of storage and semiconductor research, the next step is to enable companies to better extract value out of their mountains of data, via big data analytics. “This is where real opportunities lie, and where some folks may miss the boat. As soon as big data success stories are advertised and people see that there is gold in their data … then you will find more companies desiring to put more data online.”

Gartner also weighs in on this issue in a recent report. While the volume within big data is a significant issue, Gartner analysts “said the real issue is making sense of big data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions.” I could not agree more.

Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner: “The ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of information—such as text, social and context—to look for patterns that support business decisions in what we call Pattern-Based Strategy. Pattern-Based Strategy, as an engine of change, utilizes all the dimensions in its pattern-seeking process. It then provides the basis of the modeling for new business solutions, which allows the business to adapt…”

The ability to handle this explosion of data and make sense of it should be a priority of enterprises or they will be swamped in the next few years by both the data and their competitors.