IT will be all about data management, says Accenture

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture.

In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications.

Applications are becoming commodity products, with data management now the key business differentiator, as Gavin Michael, managing director of R&D and alliances at Accenture, explained: "IT and business leaders will begin to view application services as utilities that can be bought off the shelf, with complex data platforms coming to support these applications."

Accenture has also identified a further seven trends that it says will hit IT departments over the short to medium term.

1) One is the fact that customers will start using social media platforms such as Linkedin and Twitter over and above the company's own web site. This move has the potential to disrupt the way companies do business.

2) Cloud computing will become so pervasive that the term itself becomes superfluous. Hybrid clouds will "cement IT's role as a driver of business growth", according to the report.

3) The traditional "fortress mentality", where all IT is built to be secure in all circumstances, is giving way to security architecture that responds proportionately to threats in real time. There will therefore be fewer people working in data security to be replaced by automated mechanisms.

4) Privacy will take centre stage as a result of increased government regulation and policy enforcement.

5) Companies that continue to see analytics as an extension of business intelligence will be "severely underestimating its potential as a diffrentiator" – with traditional business intelligence not taking full advantage of their unstructured data.

6) IT is becoming service as opposed to service-centric. The report argues that companies are quickly moving away from monolithic systems wedded to one or more servers toward finer-grained, reusable services. The goal will be to decouple infrastructure, systems, applications and business processes from one another.

7) There will be an increased focus on user experience – business process design is currently driven by efficiency and cost reduction considerations, this will shift to being driven by the need boost customer satisfaction.