This year's Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit highlights opportunities for organizations to harness the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities. According to Gartner, "The forces combine to empower individuals as they interact with each other and their information through well-designed ubiquitous technology."
How does this nexus impact an organization's ability to support their business goals? It is fair to say that these forces have been present in various formats for some time now? So what has changed?
Distilling the essence of the forces, we find that speed, agility and availability emerge as consistent threads. Specifically, we see the speed of solution delivery, communication agility within and across channels, and the availability of analytical insight are all present.
Placing the above through the lens of organization's driving toward their business goals, it enables them to more rapidly attempt to address them. Attempt being the operative word, as with the speed, agility and insight, the alignment of business strategy to technology strategy becomes even more important in enabling those goals to be met, while supplying a foundation of capabilities for a business to capitalize on their future objectives.
In many markets where products and services between vendors are comparable, key business differentiators will be tied to comprehensive engagement throughout the lifecycle of a relationship with a prospect or customer. Without an investment in the consistent alignment of technical choices with the vision for the business strategy, discrete technical solutions can end up ultimately posing roadblocks.
Why is mobile computing considered disruptive? It potentially shines light onto an organization's ability to expose their back office systems outwardly in a secure, contextually relevant way. It implicitly shows the level of investment that organizations supply to align their information technology with their business vision.![]()
Gartner highlights the forces within the nexus as "well-designed ubiquitous technology". Considering well-designed in a holistic manner, outside of a discrete solution, capabilities that IT potentially needs to supply to the business to support initiatives like customer self-service require the knowledge of user profiles, single views of a customer and connectivity with various systems to support self-service activity. Within the first phase of a particular mobile or self-service project, these aspects may not pose an issue, but to meet a future state, business vision may call for functionality to be included that prior decisions may render costly and complicated to deliver.
The nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities offer unprecedented opportunity to expedite and optimize delivery. Organizations that will extract the most value from the nexus will do so by leveraging enterprise architecture practices to achieve long-term agility, making technology choices in line with principles that ensure the delivery of value beyond discrete technical solutions. This allows organizations to then focus on business innovation, engaging with their customers and prospects, and outmaneuvering their competition, through the use of a technical foundation carefully aligned to support business innovation.
Will you be attending the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in San Diego, CA, April 29-May 1? Oracle is proud to be a Silver sponsor, with a 30 minute breakfast session given by Christian Finn, Senior Director of Oracle WebCenter, and a booth on the show flow. We hope you’ll come find us to discuss the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities!