An interesting article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly has identified 10 technology-enabled business trends that it says is reshaping enterprises worldwide. Many of the trends are close to our heart at Orange Business Live! and the article follows on from a similar piece from McKinsey written two-and-a-half years ago. The 10 technology trends it has identified are:

• Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream: using the web to bring communities of interest together and collaborate for product development, marketing or customer support. This trend has grown out of the success of initiatives such as Open Source software development andWikipedia;

• Making the network the organization: opening the borders of the enterprise or functional groups to enable wider collaboration towards common goals. Other networks include online labor markets such as Mechanical Turk or advertising contest services such asZoopa;

• Collaboration at scale: the increasing importance of collaboration technology and tools to help knowledge workers increase their efficiency and boost overall “organizational capital”;

• The growing ‘Internet of Things’: we cover this topic regularly in the blog – most recently in an interview with Geoffrey Zbinden from Orange. It is where objects are equipped with sensors and communication capability and can make processes more efficient or create new business models;

• Experimentation and big data: with the amount of data captured and processed by enterprises ever increasing there is a potential to glean business intelligence and redesign business processes on the fly or keep on top of rapidly changing market trends;

• Wiring for a sustainable world: this trend refers to the continuing importance of green IT and the push towards IT for green, which has been extensively covered by Orange blogger Axel Haentjens, for example here;

• Imagining anything as a service: there’s little doubt that cloud computing is a major trend in enterprise computing and software as a service and infrastructure as a service have entered the general lexicon. Network service providers have been tipped as future leaders here by analysts Ovum as I wrote last week in the blog;

• The age of the multisided business model: this refers to new business models that don’t fit into the neat B2B or B2C categories, such as the “freemium” model, where some customers get free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use – Flickr is an example of this;

• Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid: the increasing importance of innovation in developing markets, such as rural Africa, where mobile banking is taking hold in a big way. Again covered in Live!;

• Producing public good on the grid: the final trend is the role of technology in imporving public service, such as e-Government or even initiative such as FixMyStreet.com, where citizens can report problems such as flytipping.

This article first appeared in Orange Business Live! http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2010/09/mckinsey-indentifies-collaboration-internet-of-things-and-cloud-as-key-business-technology-trends.html

After years of gnashing teeth about the brain drain of innovators out of the UK, it appears that the tide may be turning. A recent article in Reuters claims that international technology entrepreneurs are in fact choosing the UK, with London and Cambridge proving particularly popular. It quotes someone from the OECD saying that the “UK is now well placed in Europe on a number of indexes measuring factors like taxes, red tape, the dynamics of internal markets and how they are connected on the world stage, and the ability to access a qualified workforce.” The article also points to a review by the Legatum Institute, that places the UK 2nd in the world in “Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. Good news indeed, particularly with our esteemed bankers all threatening to take their expense accounts to Geneva.

Cloud computing is a staggeringly popular topic. Huge swathes of the work we did in 2009 related to cloud computing services and the trend looks set to continue into next year. Just about all parts of the information communications technology (ICT) industry are positioning themselves to take advantage of the predicted stratospheric growth. Although all hyped technologies will get their comeuppance at some point, cloud computing is unlikely to make much headway in enterprises if it they are worried about security.

Enterprise concerns over security are perfectly understandable: as a shared medium, how can they be sure that their data isn’t leaking into their competitors environment, and in fact are they even able to tell were their data is even stored. The latter issue can have a major regulatory impact in a number of areas, such as PCI-DSS compliance. Hackers are already reportedly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of hacking cloud computing environments. At the recent Black Hat conference, speakers demonstrated how to attack the cloud and a Trojan keylogger was reportedly found on Amazon’s AWS site only this week.

Given the importance of security to cloud computing’s success there’s little surprise that the industry is making solving the issue a priority. Here are some interesting resources & articles:

• The European Network and Information Security Agency has published a report on the risks of cloud computing;
• The Jericho Forum famous for its work on deperimeterisation published a white paper on cloud computing security earlier this year;
• In June, Jericho Forum and the Cloud Security Alliance joined up to address security. I was expecting to see a result on this collaboration in the autumn, but I haven’t seen anything yet;
• Ariel Silverstone suggests some metrics for measuring the security of your cloud computing providers;
• ISACA has published a white paper that looks at some of the security issues;
• The CSA and Novell are running an interesting looking webinar on Cloud security next week.

Many years ago I was a budding Futurist (not an Italian painter), someone who supposedly could facilitate groups through a process of imagining their own futures in whatever area of specialist industry they work in. I learned tools like Delphi and scenario planning. Admittedly, I wasn’t very good and so carried on being a writer….but the future still fascinates and daunts me in equal measure.

I’ve written many columns over the years about technology innovations and trends that would change the way we work/travel/make fun etc. The timescale is usually a couple of years. Looking back through this archive of deadlines missed (isn’t Google great for finding those articles you wish were buried), some technologies are finally taking hold. I first wrote about M2M in 2002, and while the there are tens of millions of connected devices in operation today, its not the billions I expected.

But does it really matter if you get the timescales wrong? (Admittedly, it does with catastrophic events like climate change) What’s important are ideas. So here are a few of the standout tech memes for the next 10 years, even though some are already 10-20 years old. Maybe their time has come…

• Convergence of robots, artificial intelligence and genetics: we’re all doomed said Bill Joy in his famous “Why the future doesnt need us”  - from Wired back in 2000
• Spimes and blobjects - the chatter of a vast internet of self-regulating motes. Bruce Sterling again.
• Vernor Vinge’s Singularity (concerned with transhumanism), Bruce Sterling’s repose, and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity (an update to the Age of Spiritual Machines)
• Why we should all live in cities if we want to save the natural world – Stewart Brand’s seminar at SALT
• Good Enough technology revolution (where the best fails, and the quick/cheap/dirty fix dominates) versus The Long Tail where niche rocks.
• Expanding cone of uncertainly and problems with predicting technological revolutions by Paul Saffo at the Institute of the Future

Could you recommend some other prophecies and memes for the Tens?

From a post we’ve just written for Orange Business Live…..

IPv6 has been talked about for so long without widespread adoption, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a solution in search of a problem: but nothing could be further from the truth. Vint Cert, co-creator of TCP/IP and currently chief Internet evangelist at Google, recently reminded us that the IPv4 addresses will run out next year or early in 2011. Its not just computers, servers and mobile devices that are gobbling up all of the existing address space: increasingly devices like the Amazon Kindle, M2M sensors and TV set-top boxes are searching for their own address.

IPv6 enables a whole spectrum of new applications across several vertical sectors. For example, cars using IPv6-enabled sensors could know, in advance, about traffic threats on the road, patients can be monitored in real time by their doctor and businesses can manage their supply chains and optimize them for maximum efficiency.

As well as allowing objects and sensors to interact with the world around them, IPv6 applies some very specific network control advantages that enhance the experience of anyone using them. Primarily, IPv6 is built to be more robust than its predecessor and this is apparent in its ‘always on, real time’ traffic delivery capabilities. Another IPv6 advantage is its support for more robust ad-hoc networking support where objects and sensors in different geographies could be moving on and off the network at any given moment, such as during a war or disaster recovery.

Network operators such as Orange have begun rolling out IPv6 support by upgrading their networks in advance of the proliferation of devices that will have their own address and a more interactive purpose in life. Industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, environment and transportation are best positioned to take advantage of the efficiencies that IPv6 brings.

To read our top 5 applications, go to the Orange Business Live blog: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-5-next-generation-apps-for-ipv6.html