Top Industry Predictions for IT Organizations, as Identified by Gartner

Bangalore: Gartner, Inc. has revealed its top industry predictions for IT organizations and users for 2013 and beyond. Analysts said that social networking, mobile communications, the cloud and information are pressuring enterprises worldwide to make fundamental changes in business processes and that industry decision-makers should use these predictions to understand and respond to this Nexus of Forces.

CIOs and other IT and business leaders can use these recommendations to better understand the forces that are changing their world and develop strategies to address the requirements of a fast-changing business environment. The top industry predictions include:

• By 2016, three automakers will have announced concrete plans for upcoming automobile launches that will offer autonomous vehicle technology.
• By 2015, nontraditional money creation and exchange will enable 125 million more people to participate in the mainstream global economy.
• By 2016, patients will be harmed or placed at risk by a medical device security breach.
• By 2016, national governments will require institutions to surrender student records for a redesigned, cost-cutting curriculum based on big data analysis.
• By 2015, natural-language processing (NLP) use among large healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) in English-speaking countries will quintuple, fueled by documentation, coding, quality reporting and research.
• By 2015, to avoid becoming simply transaction factories, successful payer organizations will turn to information integration as their competitive differentiator.
• By 2016, half of U.S. utility customers will have access to standardized energy usage data, but only 20 percent will use it.
• By year end 2014, pay-as-you-drive insurance will rise significantly to account for 10 percent of overall annual auto insurance premiums.
• By 2017, more than 50 percent of the media sold to advertisers by agencies will be priced based on performance.
• By 2014, less than 2 percent of consumers globally will adopt Near Field Communication (NFC)-based mobile payments.
• More than 50 percent of government shared-service organizations that provide cloud services by 2015 will discontinue or downscale them by 2017.
• By 2015, 50 percent of Tier 1 consumer goods manufacturers will invest in technology startups to maintain access to emerging business-to-consumer (B2C) technology.
• Through 2014 enterprise software spend will increase by 25 percent from current figures as a consequence of the proliferation of smart operational technology (OT).
• By 2016, at least 25 percent of discrete manufacturers will adopt 3D printing to produce parts for products they sell or service.

"Many of the Nexus of Forces direct and indirect impacts, such as the need to respond to the pervasiveness of social networking and the mobile-device-driven consumerization of IT, are being felt across virtually all industries," said Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Others, including intensifying regulatory requirements, resulting in part from increasing reliance on cloud computing and other 'open' IT delivery models, are industry-specific. But all these forces, and the changes in business processes they demand, present enterprise IT and business decision-makers with an extraordinarily difficult set of choices in the years to come."