Description
The digital era not only makes big bets possible but increasingly necessary.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Digital Business Era:
Stretch Your Boundaries
Foreword 3
Introduction 4
Trends
01: The Internet of Me 18
02: Outcome Economy 34
03: Platform (R)evolution 50
04: The Intelligent Enterprise 70
05: Workforce Reimagined 88
Conclusion 104
Research Methodology 106
End Notes 110
Contacts 118
CONTENTS
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2 CONTENTS
We are pleased to present the Accenture Technology
Vision 2015, our annual view of the technology
trends that will have a profound impact on
enterprises for the next three to ?ve years.
This year, we see an unprecedented leap forward by
organizations on the journey to becoming digital
businesses. The change is not simply progress. It’s
culminating in a diferent way of doing business
entirely. “Digital Business Era: Stretch Your Boundaries,”
looks at how digital businesses are moving beyond
their traditional models. It focuses on how these
businesses, in aggregate, are creating a hyper-
connected world where companies, consumers and
even everyday objects have instant capabilities to act
and interact with each other digitally across the globe.
We call this world the “We Economy,” and it ofers
savvy companies new strategies to compete and win
in a digital world. It also provides rich opportunities
for businesses to collaborate with other players in
the digital ecosystem to place “big bets”—on new
products, services and experiences—that would not
have been possible just one or two years ago, but
today can shape new markets at scale.
The critical message from our Accenture Technology
Vision 2015 is that businesses must think and act
diferently to succeed in this new environment.
A single idea, a single technology or a single
organization will no longer be the key to success.
High performers of the future will be those who
position themselves at the center of the emerging
digital ecosystems.
The Accenture Technology Vision 2015 is a must-read
for leaders of organizations across industries and
around the world. We hope it provides relevant ideas
to help you stretch boundaries in your journey to
become a digital business.
FOREWORD
Pierre Nanterme
Chairman & CEO
Paul Daugherty
Chief Technology Ofcer
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
FOREWORD 3
If your company is like most, over the
last few years you have seen your top
teams focused on leveraging social, mobile,
analytics, and cloud (SMAC) to transform
your enterprise into a digital business.
Today, the challenge has become:
what will business leaders do with their
digital advantage?
INTRODUCTION
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4 I NTRODUCTI ON
It’s not a trivial question. Becoming a digital
business is a massive transformation. Two years
ago, the Accenture Technology Vision forecasted
the pervasive need for every business to become a
digital business. We saw technology begin to take its
place as a primary driver of pro?tability and market
diferentiation in every industry.
Last year at Accenture, we began to see the industry
leaders embrace this transformation and begin to
reimagine their businesses for the digital era. The
2014 Accenture Technology Vision declared that “Big
Is the Next Big Thing.” We saw that the next logical
step for large and often long-established companies
was to start using technology not just as a way to
improve their own internal processes, but also as a
driving force for how they grow. We predicted that
these new “digerati,” with their deep resources, huge
scale, and process discipline, were about to rewrite
much of the digital playbook.
Today, we see pioneering enterprises beginning to
do just that—but they are doing far more than just
?exing their digital muscles. They are fundamentally
changing the way they look at themselves; leading
enterprises are quickly mastering the shift from “me”
to “we.” They are stretching their boundaries by
tapping into a broad array of other digital businesses,
digital customers, and even digital devices at the
edge of their networks. Leaders eager to drive change
are using this broader digital ecosystem to place bets
on a grand scale. These forward-thinking companies
are looking to shape entire markets and change the
way we work and live.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Succeeding in the
“We Economy”
The digital era not only makes big bets possible but
increasingly necessary. The Internet of Things (IoT) is
becoming a force that is driving innovation and new
opportunities by bringing every object, consumer,
and activity into the digital realm. At the same time,
leading businesses are making similar changes within
their enterprises by digitizing every employee,
process, product, and service. This year, we conducted
our ?rst Technology Vision survey, polling more than
2,000 business and technology executives across nine
countries and 10 industries, in order to understand
key technology challenges as well as priority
investments. Our survey revealed that 62 percent are
investing in digital technologies, and 35 percent are
comprehensively investing in digital as part of their
overall business strategy.
Taken in aggregate, enterprises ?nd themselves
connected to a digital fabric that has the potential
to touch all aspects of their business, their customer
relationships, and the world around them. Already,
this fabric has provided enterprises with an ability
to connect and scale up in unprecedented ways.
Companies routinely deal with hundreds of business
processes, thousands of employees, and millions of
consumers. Many large companies are at a scale
where they touch billions of lives.
More and more, however, companies are beginning
to see that these connections are not just limited to
their employees and customers. They also have the
potential to tie themselves into a global network
of businesses, individuals, and things from every
industry around the world.
This grand network of connections and its
transformational power introduce a new era in the
digital age—the age of “digital ecosystems.”
Pioneering companies have already realized the
implications of tapping into a digital ecosystem. They
see that in such digitally driven, hyper-connected
times, they have the capacity for action beyond
transforming themselves into digital businesses.
62
%
Report they are investing
in digital technologies, and
35% are comprehensively
investing in digital as part
of their overall business
strategy.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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6 I NTRODUCTI ON
In our survey, 81 percent believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into interconnected ecosystems.
Huge efciencies can and will be gained as businesses
continue to master digital technologies internally.
Visionary companies, however, are recognizing that
as every business becomes a digital business, together
they can efect change on a much bigger stage.
Working together, they can shape experiences—and
outcomes—in ways never before possible.
This is highlighted best in the rapidly growing
Industrial Internet of Things. Here, companies are
using these connections to ofer new services,
reshape experiences, and enter new markets by
creating digital ecosystems. Home Depot, for
example, is looking to shape the way people live
through an emerging connected home market. The
company is working with manufacturers to ensure
all of the connected home products it sells are
compatible with the Wink connected home system. In
doing so, Home Depot is creating its own connected
home ecosystem, with a wide range of services that
are easy to install.
Philips is taking a similar approach. No longer is
their healthcare practice just a producer of medical
equipment; Philips is teaming up with Salesforce
to build a platform that they believe will reshape
and optimize the way healthcare is delivered. The
envisioned platform will create an ecosystem of
developers building healthcare applications to enable
collaboration and work?ow between doctors and
patients across the entire spectrum of care, from
self-care and prevention to diagnosis and treatment
through recovery and wellness. By integrating data
from multiple sources worldwide, Philips sees an
enormous opportunity to improve patient health by
enhancing the decision-making capability of medical
professionals while increasing the active engagement
of patients in their own treatment. The ecosystem
Philips orchestrates to achieve these improved
outcomes is vast: electronic medical records,
diagnostic and treatment information obtained
through Philips’ imaging equipment, monitoring
equipment, and personal devices and technologies
like Apple’s HealthKit.
81
%
Believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will
dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into
interconnected ecosystems.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Fiat is looking toward connected cars as the
next growth opportunity within the automotive
industry. Partnering with leading edge companies
in navigation systems, media, social media and
entertainment sectors, Fiat is creating its own
Uconnect platform. It will be integrated with the
Fiat-Chrysler Group’s vehicles to provide drivers
with communication, entertainment, and navigation
features that can help drivers stay focused on driving.
Home Depot, Philips, Fiat, and many other companies
are making big bets on huge opportunities that have
the potential to bring about change on a global
scale. By tapping into digital ecosystems, these
companies have the ability to realize ambitions that
transcend any single business or any one industry.
These pioneering businesses see great potential
to make a diference—and to make a pro?t—by
operating as ecosystems, not just as individual
corporate entities. By mastering the shift from “me”
to “we,” these leading enterprises are shaping a new
economy—the “we economy.”
By tapping into the digital ecosystem, ordinary
businesses can tackle challenges that were previously
well beyond their scope. They can realize an opportunity
to help design and create smart mega-cities of the
future, radically rebuild centuries-old modes of
transportation, or raise the quality of healthcare by
addressing it holistically across many industries, from
hospitals to insurance to apparel. These are the types
of “epic” transformations that excite customers,
inspire employees, galvanize long-term suppliers—
and enable investors to reap big rewards.
The new power brokers will place themselves at the
center of these digital ecosystems and quickly master
new digital relationships with their customers, end
users, suppliers, alliance partners, developers, data
sources, makers of smart devices, and specialty talent
sources. All will share the same goal: to grow new
markets and in turn their individual businesses.
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8 I NTRODUCTI ON
None of this will be easy, but the efort has the
potential for tremendous rewards. The new age of
the digital ecosystem isn’t only about changing
an individual company; it’s about shaping entire
markets. Each enterprise will determine its own
fortunes—and that’s an opportunity that no company
will want to miss.
2015 Vision Trends:
Hallmarks of tomorrow’s
digital business leaders
Technology is moving at a breakneck pace. Social,
mobile, analytics, cloud, and increasingly the Internet
of Things have become driving forces behind the
rapid evolution of digital businesses. This year’s
Accenture Technology Vision highlights ?ve emerging
themes that re?ect the shifts being seen among the
digital power brokers of tomorrow.
1. The Internet of Me is changing the way people
around the world interact through technology, placing
the end user at the center of every digital experience.
2. At the same time, digital devices on the edge are
powering an Outcome Economy and enabling a new
business model that shifts the focus from selling
things to selling results.
3. The Platform (R)evolution re?ects how digital
platforms are becoming the tools of choice for
building next-generation products and services—and
entire ecosystems in the digital and physical worlds.
4. The Intelligent Enterprise is making its machines
smarter—embedding software intelligence into
every aspect of its business to drive new levels of
operational efciency, evolution, and innovation.
5. Advances in more natural human interfaces,
wearable devices, and smart machines are
extending intelligent technology to interact as a
“team member,” working alongside employees in a
Workforce Reimagined.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Collectively, these trends represent the newest
expression of Accenture’s stance that “Every Business
Is a Digital Business.” They also add to Accenture’s
multiyear perspective on technology’s global
tectonic shifts that should impact the strategies and
operational priorities for organizations worldwide.
Historically, the trends in each year’s Accenture
Technology Vision highlight the evolution of a
key technology—some of these technologies are
already central to the digital explorations of many
leading enterprises. Viewed in aggregate, the trends
represent a fundamental shift in the assumptions
that companies must make as they plan for success
in the years to come. Business leaders in every
industry can draw insight and inspiration from these
rich perspectives as they consider where digital
technologies can take their organizations in the future.
But becoming a digital business is no longer simply
about incorporating these technologies into an
organization—it’s about using digital technology to
weave businesses into the broader digital fabric that
extends to customers, partners, employees, and
other industries.
These digital ecosystems are still emerging, but the
proactive enterprises that take the next few years
to de?ne the ecosystems in their own industries
will create their own destiny. The question for every
enterprise is: what role will your company play in this
next important stage of the digital revolution?
Completing the picture
The Accenture Technology Vision comprises a three-
year set of technology trends. While we highlight
the latest trends for each year, it is important to
recognize that each trend represents only part of
the picture. As enterprises continue their journey
toward becoming digital businesses, they will need to
keep up with the latest evolutions in technology and
continue to master those that have been maturing.
These technologies are quickly becoming the base
for how enterprises will build their next generation
of business, as well as the catalysts for many of the
trends that we discuss this year. To reference the full
papers behind the set of trends below, please go to
www.accenture.com/technologyvision.
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10 I NTRODUCTI ON
THE EVOLUTION
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
I NTRODUCTI ON 11
Beyond the cloud: stop talking about
cloud—the value is in using it
No vision would be complete without commenting
on the cloud, but cloud computing is no longer
an emerging trend. The on-demand technology
is pervasive in all decisions made today; the key
question is not “Should we use cloud?” but rather
“How can we use cloud?” What’s more, cloud isn’t
a single concept. Its individual elements—from
software-as-a-service (SaaS) to platform-as-a-service
(PaaS), from public to private—are as distinct and
diferent from one another as the opportunities are
for enterprises to use them. The next phase is putting
the cloud to work and crafting an overarching
approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the
fabric of IT solutions and responses—with business
value the uppermost priority.
Design for analytics: formulate the
questions, and design for the answers
Business intelligence. Data analytics. Big data.
Companies are no longer sufering from a lack of
data—they’re sufering from a lack of the right data.
Business leaders need the right big data to efectively
de?ne the strategic direction of the enterprise. The
current generation of software was designed for
functionality, but the next generation must also be
designed for analytics.
Relationships at scale: moving beyond
transactions to digital relationships
Businesses need to re-think their digital strategies
to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. While
mobile technology, social networks, and context-
based services have increased the number of digital
connections with consumers, most companies are
still creating more detailed views of their consumers,
their attributes, and their transactions. Individually,
these connections may represent new types of user
experiences, even new sets of sales channels—but
that’s not the real opportunity. Taken in aggregate,
digital represents a key new approach to consumer
engagement and loyalty: companies can manage
relationships with consumers, at scale.
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Seamless collaboration: right channel,
right worker, right job
It’s time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its
employees work. The rise in social networking has
breathed new life into collaboration. Users’ new
social behavior and their growing expectation that
every app will be “social” are pushing companies to
create new user experiences. However, to increase
productivity, enterprises must move beyond
standalone social and collaborative channels and
begin to embed them directly into their core business
processes. The new approach is to build social and
collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.
Active defense: adapting cyber security
defenses to the threat
Despite an increasing focus on securing the digital
business, IT departments struggle to keep pace with
recent advances in security technology. Enterprises
know that endpoint security is not enough, but
the move to active defense—risk-based approaches
to security management, analytics-driven event
detection, and re?ex-like incident response—isn’t
yet happening on a broad scale. Although these
technologies are maturing rapidly and communities
are forming to expose the risks, the biggest barrier
is the slow adoption of solutions that already exist.
IT’s core challenge: get current with best practices in
security, get smarter about the new active defense
possibilities, and get real about the journey ahead.
Data velocity: matching the speed of
decision to the speed of action
Business leaders have been bombarded with statistics
about the soaring volume of data that they can mine
for valuable insights. They have been deluged with
articles describing the incredible variety of “external”
data hidden in everything from tweets and blogs to
sensor outputs and GPS data from mobile phones.
But the next perspective on data that deserves
attention is data velocity—the pace with which data
can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in order to
produce insights that managers can act on quickly.
As expectations of near-instant responses become
the norm, business leaders will rely heavily on higher
data velocities to gain a competitive edge.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Software-de?ned networking:
virtualization’s last mile
With virtualization investments already paying of in
servers, and starting to pay of in storage, businesses
must turn their attention to virtualizing the network
in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and
reap the full value of their virtualization investments.
Like other virtualization technologies, software-
de?ned networking (SDN) has the ability to radically
change the ?exibility with which businesses and
IT operate. You may think of networking as a low-
level technology, but this aspect has the ability to
transform enterprises. With SDN, businesses can
?nally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise.
Digital-physical blur: extending
intelligence to the edge
The real world is coming online, as smart objects,
devices, and machines increase our insight into and
control over the physical world. More than just an
“Internet of Things,” this new layer of connected
intelligence augments employees, automates
processes, and incorporates machines into our lives.
For consumers, this provides new levels of
empowerment. In addition to being highly informed,
consumers can interact and in?uence the way they
experience everything around them. For their part,
organizations now get real-time connections to the
real world that allows machines as well as employees
to act and react faster—and more intelligently.
From workforce to crowdsource:
rise of the borderless enterprise
Picture a workforce that extends beyond your
employees, one that consists of any user connected
to the Internet. Cloud, social, and collaboration
technologies now allow organizations to tap into
vast pools of human resources across the world, and
many people are motivated to help. Channeling these
eforts to drive business goals is a challenge, but the
opportunity is enormous. Such an approach can give
every business access to an immense, agile workforce
that not only is better suited to solving some of the
problems that organizations struggle with today, but
will often do so for free.
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14 I NTRODUCTI ON
Data supply chain: putting information
into circulation
Data technologies are evolving rapidly, but most
have been adopted in piecemeal fashion. As a
result, enterprise data is vastly underutilized. Data
ecosystems are complex and littered with data silos,
limiting the value that organizations can get out
of their own data by making it difcult to access.
To truly unlock that value, companies must start
treating data more as a supply chain, enabling
the data to ?ow easily and usefully through the
entire organization—and eventually throughout the
organization’s ecosystem of partners as well.
Harnessing hyperscale: hardware is back
(and never really went away)
Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in
software, the hardware world is now a hotbed of
new development as demand soars for bigger, faster,
and more efcient data centers. Every company will
see the bene?ts of “hyperscale” innovation trickle
into their data centers in the form of cost reduction,
but as companies digitize their businesses, more and
more will see these systems as essential to enabling
their next wave of growth.
Business of applications: software as a
core competency in the digital world
The way we build software is changing. Mimicking
the shift in the consumer world, enterprises are
rapidly moving from applications to apps. Yes,
there will always be big, complex enterprise
software systems to support large organizations,
and IT developers will need to keep customizing
those systems, providing updates and patches,
and more. But now, as organizations push for
greater operational agility, there is a sharp shift
toward simpler, more modular apps. What are the
implications for IT leaders and business leaders?
Soon, they will have to decide who plays what
application development role in their new digital
organizations—and how they can transform the
nature of application development itself.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Architecting resilience: built to survive
failure, the mantra of the nonstop business
In the digital era, businesses are now expected to
support the nonstop demands that their employees
and stakeholders place on business processes,
services, and systems. This shift to support ever-
changing priorities has ripple efects throughout
the organization, especially in the ofce of the chief
information ofcer. There, the need for “always
on” IT infrastructure, security, and business process
economics can mean the diference between business
as usual and the erosion of brand value. As a result,
today’s IT leaders must ensure that their systems are
designed for failure rather than designed to spec.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
I NTRODUCTI ON 17
The Internet of Me:
Our world, personalized
As everyday objects are going online, so too are experiences—
creating an abundance of digital channels that reach
deep into every aspect of individuals’ lives. Forward-
thinking businesses are changing the ways they build new
applications, products, and services. To gain control over
these points of access, they are creating highly personalized
experiences that engage and exhilarate consumers—without
breaching the customer’s trust. The companies that succeed
in this new “Internet of Me” will become the next generation
of household names.
TREND 1
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18 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
Much of the internet’s appeal has been in the way
it enables each of us to personalize our lives. My
news feed. My playlist. My book recommendations.
My new car, customized online by me.
But as the saying goes, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Enterprises are now actively creating connected
worlds in which their customers’ preferences,
habits, and context are woven together to make
daily experiences simple, delightful, and personal.
Although many companies can already mimic
customer intimacy—as seen in online ads that quickly
re?ect your latest purchases—the new frontier means
something much more authentic and meaningful to
the individual.
What’s happening now is that every experience is
becoming a digital experience as ordinary “things”
become intelligent devices. Today, there are digital
parking meters, smart refrigerators, adaptive security
systems, and much more. These digital devices enable
personalized experiences: there are smart lights
that can react to environmental factors to provide
individual user experiences.
1
Cars can ?ne-tune
their performance by learning the driver’s habits.
2
Whole sports stadiums have been brought online so
individual event-goers can be alerted to shorter lines,
ofered engaging content, and noti?ed of ?ash sales
on nearby food and merchandise.
3
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Experience matters most: 89 percent of business
leaders surveyed by Gartner believe that customer
experience will be their primary basis for competition
by 2016.
4
Beyond mobility: The connected world—including
cars, homes, and wearables—are creating a rapidly
expanding world of access to the customer. Two out
of three of IT and business executives (66 percent) we
surveyed report that smart objects will have a high or
very high impact on their organizations by helping to
advance a company’s industry position or gain
competitive advantage.
Rising consumer demand: Two-thirds of consumers
are expected to purchase a connected home device
within the next ?ve years, and the ownership of
consumer wearables is expected to double year over
year by 2016.
5
Contextual experiences: Big data analytics
solutions, combined with the proliferation of edge
devices collecting highly contextual data, are
allowing businesses to craft experiences that are
unique for each user.
Personalization everywhere: Businesses everywhere,
not just “tech companies,” are using personalization
to build a better experience. Companies integrating
personalization with their core product or service are
?nding a signi?cant competitive advantage. Sixty
percent of organizations we surveyed indicate they
are seeing a positive ROI on their investments in
personalization technologies.
WHY NOW?
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20 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
In fact, in our survey, companies shared that they are
exploring a variety of emerging channels to engage
customers including: wearables (62 percent), connected
TVs (68 percent), connected cars (59 percent), and
smart objects (64 percent). These, and countless
similar examples, are coalescing into the “Internet
of Me.” This describes the emerging interconnected
environment in which businesses are building
products and services to be designed for, created for,
and speci?cally centered on the individual.
This signals a wholesale change in the way businesses
must design applications. It means much more than
just “personalization for the connected world.”
Now, the focus has to be on experience—and
success means making people the center of business
decisions. Features and functionality must re?ect
what individuals are trying to accomplish, enabling
them to control, measure, and even automate parts
of their lives in both the digital and physical worlds.
Leading companies are already moving fast in
this direction—and reframing the competitive
conversation in their industries. In our Vision survey,
81 percent place the personalized customer
experience in their top three priorities for their
organization, with 39 percent reporting it as their
top priority. The new connected car from Mercedes-
Benz, for instance, includes application programming
interface (API) connections to Nest thermostats at
the driver’s home.
6
The car can notify the thermostat
when the driver will arrive, and the thermostat in
turn adjusts the in-home temperature to the driver’s
desired settings. Appliance-maker Whirlpool is
making similar Internet of Me moves: its smart dryers
include a function that allows environmentally
conscious consumers to schedule energy-intensive
tasks for when electricity is more abundant and rates
are lower.
7
Fashion and apparel leader Ralph Lauren,
in line with the quanti?ed-self movement, has
developed a sensor-embedded athletic shirt that
tracks activity and heart rate.
8
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
For more and more companies, this new focus on
exhilarating, user-centric experiences is paying of.
Sixty percent of our survey respondents report
positive results from their investments in personalization
technologies. These numbers will only improve as
companies gain sophistication in this space, and
quickly become the foundation for the next
generation of business. Gartner research shows that
89 percent of companies believe that customer
experience will be their primary basis for competition
by 2016, versus 36 percent four years ago.
9
The momentum is here and now: devices are
becoming more interconnected and consumers
continue to demonstrate their demand for these
“smart” devices. It is therefore incumbent on business
leaders to start reworking their products, services
and business processes accordingly. Businesses
that embrace the Internet of Me concept will ?nd
themselves sustaining higher levels of engagement,
and in turn, opening up whole new vistas for growth.
For the businesses that don’t soon take advantage
of the growing prevalence and constancy of
connectivity, their competitors surely will.
The new battleground
for mindshare
Customer mindshare across the Internet of Me is up
for grabs since there are few preconceived notions
of what to expect and few strong players—thus far.
Capturing mindshare will be critically important for
every company looking to migrate from crowded
existing channels toward new opportunities. In its
new context, mindshare is not just about building
awareness of the company’s oferings across
emerging channels—that’s just the beginning. The
goal is to command the user’s attention through
engaging and delightful experiences. Companies
will then have the ability to pitch new products and
services or to act as gatekeepers for other businesses
that want to access users through these new channels.
To understand the expanded concept of mindshare
and the value it can generate, consider Facebook:
approximately 70 percent of smartphone owners
are active users of the social network, opening the
app an average of 14 times a day.
10
The service has
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22 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
become nearly synonymous with social interaction in
the same way that Google has with search. Because
Google and Facebook hold such large swaths of
consumer mindshare, they have become the de facto
platforms upon which other businesses advertise
and deliver new services. To put words into numbers:
Facebook’s ad revenue for Q3 2014 grew by 64 percent
year over year, with mobile ads accounting for
66 percent of the growth.
11
With each evolution of technology, businesses have
competed across new channels to gain customer
mindshare. As the Web became ubiquitous in homes,
companies invested in building new architectures
to capture the mindshare of the emerging “online
consumer.” Similarly, now that smartphones account
for nearly two-thirds of the mobile phone market,
enterprises are investing heavily in mobility. Mobility
investments have rewarded companies that have
pursued them, and new business models have
developed exclusively around apps. Uber and Lyft, the
ride-share services, are just two examples of “mobile-
only” companies that are disrupting segments of the
transportation industry.
The Internet of Me raises the “mindshare” stakes.
Now, the shift is from mobility to the Internet of
Things (IoT)—and this time the opportunity is bigger.
Rather than just one channel, like the PC or phone,
the convergence of the digital and physical worlds is
creating hundreds of potential channels that reach
deep into every aspect of people’s lives. An Acquity
Group study con?rms that consumer adoption of
IoT devices is growing exponentially: the report
found that nearly two-thirds of consumers intend to
purchase a connected home device by 2019, while
the ownership of wearable technology is expected to
have doubled year over year by 2016.
12
This latest technology shift provides the best of
two worlds: the intelligence, personalization, and
adaptability of digital technology blended with the
interactive and immersive experience of the real world.
As consumer adoption grows, businesses have the
opportunity to de?ne how people will use these new
devices; how they will connect with one another;
and what form the interactions will take. Controlling
those experiences is a lucrative role that is entirely
up for grabs.
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Take AT&T Drive—AT&T’s connected car platform—
as an example of how businesses can ?nd multiple
opportunities within a single channel. Nearly every
major auto manufacturer is investing in building
connected cars, yet few have the necessary networking
and software experience to build an end-to-end solution.
AT&T Drive provides them with a suite of features
that they can pick from rather than having to build
everything themselves. But AT&T is also using the
connected car as a platform to grow consumer
mindshare: the company now allows customers to
include connected cars—such as the Audi Q3—in its
shared data plans for no more than it costs to add a
tablet to a plan.
13
Leading companies such as AT&T see that, for now,
the competition for the Internet of Me is meager.
But they sense that the opportunity is vast—and they
know that they can gain an enduring advantage if
they successfully and consistently deliver outstanding
consumer experiences.
Turning mindshare
into value
As businesses grow their mindshare across new
channels, they can leverage their position to
deliver new products and services that enhance
each individual’s Internet of Me. Certainly, greater
mindshare can lead to greater wallet share. For
instance, Coca-Cola Amatil increased sales by 12
percent after retro?tting vending machines with
touchscreens, video cameras, and Microsoft Kinect
technology to create a fresh, personalized vending
experience. But driving sales is only one way to
bene?t from this new access to the consumer: the
data created by these connected vending machines
is enabling the Southeast Asian beverage company
to make better decisions about cooler placement,
restocking, and more.
14
Businesses will ?nd value in the ways they
personalize their products or services. Geography,
culture, and varied individual needs will all impact
how businesses scale their Internet of Me solutions.
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For example, in some regions there is a higher value
on societal bene?ts than on individual bene?ts; any
Internet of Me strategy should carefully consider
local preferences. No one solution ?ts all—every
company will ?rst need to determine which channels
best suit their needs and then build unique solutions
for those channels.
Georgia Power, a utilities provider, is driving new
customer value by leveraging its network of 2.4 million
smart meters. The company now ofers consumers
access to their real-time data generated by the
meters so they can gain a deeper understanding of
their energy use. Georgia Power is even attracting
new business by ofering personalized services such
as pre-paid and pay-as-you-go billing—allowing the
company to serve customers who do not have good
credit and cannot aford a security deposit.
15
A key point here is that “ordinary” traditional
companies—not hot tech startups—are making these
moves. Companies such as Coca-Cola Amatil, and
Georgia Power are gaining more access to consumer
mindshare by ofering pervasive experiences in
traditional settings. By focusing on the very things
that made them leaders in their markets in the ?rst
place, traditional companies have natural advantages
in the Internet of Me.
Experience matters most
in the Internet of Me
Ultimately, success in the Internet of Me will be driven
by how businesses deliver the individual experiences
that consumers demand. Many businesses are already
aware of this: 62 percent of organizations attribute
their investments in omni-channel initiatives to the
simple fact that their customers expect it—but only
a few agree that they are doing it well.
16
While
companies have been experimenting with
personalization to one degree or another for years,
today, the abundance of data and sensors can
provide a much more complete picture from which
companies can personalize their products and
services at scale.
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Case in point: PhysIQ is a device-agnostic analytics
platform that healthcare professionals are using to
leverage the new types of data being generated by IoT
devices such as ?tness trackers. The health-monitoring
platform can pull data from any combination of devices,
aggregate it, and deliver a single, comprehensive
health score. The score is intimately personalized:
data is constantly generated by whichever devices
the user chooses, and the platform learns individual
habits and tendencies over time. This makes PhysIQ
much more efective in predicting and alerting
healthcare providers to any anomalies.
17
It’s essential to emphasize that there is no singular
personalization strategy. Each solution is dependent
on what tools, data streams, and feedback loops
a business has access to and how it chooses to
integrate these data sources to build personalization
into its products and services. Macy’s, the department
store, is personalizing its traditional brick-and-
mortar experience by using iBeacons to send push
noti?cations to in-store shoppers. The alerts use data
from Shopkick, an app that lets shoppers browse,
“favorite,” and discover new items from the Macy’s
catalog. The messages instantly notify shoppers
which of their favorites are available in-store, and
then deliver customized discounts on those items.
18
Eighty-one percent of executives we surveyed
place the personalized customer experience in
their top three priorities for their organization,
with 39 percent reporting it as their top priority. To
truly become a leader in the Internet of Me space,
businesses will have to ?gure out how the customer
experience they “own” relates to other experiences
in the customer’s life or how they can help to deliver
the outcomes that a customer is trying to achieve.
One good example is Automatic. Primarily a car
diagnostic device, drivers can use the device for
other tasks as well—like sending a canned text to
pre-selected contacts whenever they park their
vehicles near a supermarket.
19
This automated task
is powered by Automatic’s integration with If This
Then That (IFTTT)—a free service that helps connected
devices communicate with each other. Belkin, Nest,
and Philips all have a number of IFTTT “recipes” that
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26 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
let individuals mix experiences, such as lighting
conditions and temperature, all based on where they
are or what they are doing—and all without touching
a switch or taking out a phone.
20
Because the user
de?nes the relationships and picks the recipes, the
resulting experiences are both in?nitely personalized
and scalable.
The power of ecosystems
Greater opportunities for personalization will
emerge as individual businesses realize they are not
the only participants in any given Internet of Me.
Finding new partnerships that combine channels and
services to bene?t the individual will prove lucrative
for companies that execute against this idea. Take
Samsung, for example. The consumer electronics
giant is building a wide range of connected big-
box products such as refrigerators. These physical
products now represent an interface to the digital
world that other businesses can use to their
advantage—as Pandora is already doing.
Pandora had been facing the challenge of growing
its share of the in-home music listening market. The
music streaming service accepted Samsung’s ofer to
be one of the ?rst integrated apps because it saw the
refrigerator as a platform with immense potential
for helping the company break into the market
for “home listening.”
21
Now users can tune in to
personalized radio stations in the place where a great
deal of in-home listening happens: the kitchen.
Optimizing a strategy for the interconnected world
starts with determining a company’s role in the Internet
of Me. As companies begin to specialize, some will
build devices, others will develop applications and
oferings on top of those devices, and others still will
build the platforms that other providers plug into.
Nike’s shift in its FuelBand strategy indicates that leading
businesses are already thinking this way. Initially, Nike
built the FuelBand device and maintained the app that
tracked and shared users’ runs. However, the sportswear
company discontinued hardware production in favor
of operating as a data analytics provider in this space.
22
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
By opting to focus on speci?c elements of the
experience (data, analytics, and insights), Nike is
better positioned to become a partner in, rather than
competing for a share of, the wearable device market.
Delivering a billion or more personalized experiences
every day is no small feat, yet this is what tomorrow’s
platforms will be required to do in the Internet of
Me. As businesses start to identify their niches in this
new environment, they will do well to shortlist the
partners with which they can best collaborate and
aggregate mindshare. By ofering APIs and data that
are open and accessible to others in their ecosystems,
constituent players will acquire the power of
businesses that are many times their size. Seventy-
two percent of executives we surveyed expect
that within the next two years, they will see broad
adoption of industry platforms that will integrate
data with digital business partners.
Technology enables,
but trust endures
As businesses create personalized experiences, they
necessarily receive troves of personal data about
consumers, their habits, and their preferences. To
be comfortable sharing their data, consumers must
have trust in the other party. This trust acts as a bond
between the business and the consumer, and allows
product and service adoption to ?ourish.
However, consumers are likely to seek alternatives and
exit a relationship when trust is broken, particularly
if that broken trust leads to adverse impacts in the
real world. A recent Accenture survey reveals that
67 percent of individuals are willing to share data with
companies, but that percentage drops to 27 percent
if the business is sharing data with a third party.
23
Since data collection and sharing have direct
implications on a company’s ability to compete for
mindshare in the Internet of Me, digital businesses must
improve their competency within three components
of trust: security, privacy, and transparency.
72
%
Expect that within the
next two years, they will
see broad adoption of
industry platforms that will
integrate data with digital
business partners.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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28 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
Irresponsible handling of data is quickly becoming
a corporate risk—in terms of reputation, customer
attrition, and regulatory compliance. Throughout
the data supply chain, protecting customer data is
fundamental to attracting and retaining consumer trust.
In the age of big data, companies can take a number
of security-related precautions to hedge against risks
and still maintain integration with legacy systems.
Hive for Hadoop ofers SQL-like query tools to present
unstructured data in a relational format. Also, limiting
queries by restricting access to classi?ed data ofers
another level of protection for shared data.
New data protection measures can be seen in the
strategies of both Apple and Google: encrypted ?le
systems are the default in iOS 8 and Android L.
24
Importantly, the decryption key now resides on the
user’s phone, outside of the corporation, shifting the
burden of data protection from the provider to the user.
Each company may require unique security solutions
to address its own set of risks. The most immediate
imperative is to ensure that software and security
controls are able to address the latest risks and that
a plan is in place for responding to new risks in a
timely fashion. Monitoring what data is accessed, by
whom, and why is becoming a critical function of
maintaining trust. This is particularly important as
consumers adopt smart devices for everything from
pacemakers to home security systems.
The traditional notion of privacy, the second
component of trust, is evolving and becoming
far more complex. Regulators are becoming more
active in de?ning public policy with “do not track”
legislation emerging in the European Union and the
State of California.
At the very least, businesses need to ensure compliance
with their terms of use and privacy policies. This may
seem obvious, but all too frequently, commitments
are unintentionally violated by employees with good
intentions for innocuous reasons.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
85
%
Say that the average
consumer has very
limited insight into how
organizations are using data
related to them.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
Third-party compliance audits of adherence to
privacy requirements are a positive step toward
building trust. While conducting regular and
pervasive audits is a step forward, disclosing results
to stakeholders is a giant leap. This proposition
becomes more complex as companies increasingly
share data. Sharing data through APIs or appending
metadata through DRM-capable systems are ways to
automate and manage exposure of privacy audits.
As the ?nal component of trust, companies must be
transparent about their practices with customers.
An astounding 85 percent of organizations say
that while the amount of data they have related
to the average consumer is growing, consumers
themselves have very little insight into how it is
used. For example, many companies have recently
faced scrutiny for experimenting with user data.
In one experiment, an online dating site purposely
manipulated the “match percentage” between
prospective partners. As a result, users were shown
an arti?cially high score prior to connecting
with a potential match.
25
Some saw this lack of
transparency as particularly egregious because it
negated the very service users expected while using
the site.
However, experiments with SaaS users are
commonplace—often simply referred to as “user
testing,” with the goal of improving and delivering a
better service. But gone are the days when sufcient
transparency meant mere legal compliance—where
users accepted the privacy policy and terms of use
simply through signing up or clicking an “accept”
button. In order to be more transparent, businesses
need to inform users in a way that is both easy to
understand and relevant to the services provided.
The Personal Genome Project has rede?ned “informed
consent” by requiring a perfect score on a test
before participants can even enter their name. Sage
Bionetworks, a non-pro?t organization, and Lookout,
a mobile security ?rm, have taken a similar approach
and present users with interactive policy forms to
provide consent.
27
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It is not possible to overstate the increasing importance
of trust in gaining market share and user adoption of
data-rich products and services. Look no further than
the high-pro?le resignations of the CEO and CIO of
Target to see a new level of importance placed on trust
that is based on security, privacy, and transparency.
Maintaining trust, as well as the policies and practices
that drive it, is now a foundational component for
success as a digital business.
Looking ahead
The rise in the importance of trust is one clear
indication that the old adage, “Always put the
customer ?rst,” has taken on new meaning in
the digital age. Empowered consumers can put
themselves ?rst with the help of new technologies
that have given rise to the anytime, anywhere
Internet of Me. Customers increasingly want
better, faster, and cheaper all at once. In response,
companies must create new ways to capture
attention, deliver new services, and build trust.
Over time, new market ecosystems will emerge to
deliver digitally enabled, highly personalized, and
acceptably secure ofers to inform, sell, and service
customers. In a world where the virtual is migrating
to the physical, each person’s experience will difer
slightly. Companies will need to tailor their products
or services to the unique afnities of each individual.
What will your role be in the evolving Internet of Me?
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Over the next 100 days, commit your business to
gaining a deeper understanding of who your core
users are and identify opportunities to better serve
their individual needs.
• Start using your customer data to discover what
connected devices they currently use/intend to
purchase and what their goals are with the new
technology. Identify more granular segments
within your user base to accommodate future
personalization strategies.
• Review and begin to update your consumer
engagement processes and governance strategy.
Prepare to shift toward a world where every
customer has a unique view of your product,
and your product is increasingly in?uenced by
ecosystem partners.
• Evaluate competitors for their use of mass
personalization strategies. Take note of pinnacle
personalization experiences and how big data
analytics are used to deliver them. Use this
opportunity to learn what companies in related
industries are doing as well.
• Identify emerging edge technologies that can
supplement your existing product or service by
providing either new channels to your customer
or new data for contextual insights. Look to early
adopters for inspiration and best practices in
leveraging these devices.
• Appoint a cross-functional team to champion
and develop the end-user experience. Building
a strategy for the Internet of Me begins with
bringing the individual’s voice to the table.
• Assess your current back-end architecture and
data storage. In order to support a personalization
strategy at scale, the company will require
hardware that can support the increased load and
speed necessary for real-time action. Determine
what investments the company will have to make.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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32 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
By this time next year, your business should be
prepared to start extending oferings across the
Internet of Me, providing new levels of service and
personalization to your customers.
• Commission a pilot that leverages new channels
of access to the consumer. Incorporate your user
research to make experience and personalization
priorities in this new product or service.
• Determine where your company holds a
competitive advantage, or existing role, within your
users’ Internet of Me. Some possibilities include:
building devices/products, software, and apps;
providing data analytics and insights; or facilitating
seamlessly integrated experiences.
• Develop an ecosystem strategy that will allow you
to work with a portfolio of potential partners. The
resulting strategy should play to the strengths of
each company, allowing them to specialize in their
roles and deliver a complete end-user experience.
• Proactively address security issues that could leave
sensitive customer data exposed or physical devices
vulnerable to attack or failure. As new pilots and
projects are developed, connect with internal and
external subject matter experts to identify threat
pro?les and areas for improvement.
• Privacy policies must be completely overhauled
and created to re?ect a transparent, trust-centric
mindset. Carefully account for the new relationship
your business will have with consumers and their
data and how they will interact in the real world.
• Create a trust task force that is integrated across all
business units. Help leaders go beyond compliance
to make trust and privacy a seamless part of
business development in an efort to mitigate
corporate risk and liability.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
The Outcome Economy:
Hardware producing
hard results
Intelligent hardware is bridging the last mile between
the digital enterprise and the physical world. As leading
enterprises come face-to-face with the Internet of Things,
they are uncovering opportunities to embed hardware and
sensors in their digital toolboxes. They are using these highly
connected hardware components to give customers what
they really want: not more products or services, but more
meaningful outcomes. These “digital disrupters” know that
getting ahead is no longer about selling things—it’s about
selling results. Welcome to the “outcome economy.”
TREND 2
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34 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
How much would you pay to laugh out loud? If you
were a patron of a pay-per-laugh Teatreneu theater
company production in Barcelona, the answer would
be €0.30 for each instance.
1
Teatreneu uses facial
recognition technology to register each laugh and
charges customers accordingly—up to €24 per show,
a 25 percent increase over previous ticket prices.
And, if you live in the smart city of Los Angeles,
there’s a good chance you have bene?ted from
one of 7,000 smart parking spaces. The hockey
puck-sized sensors, which Streetline installs in
the roadbeds of the cities and campuses where it
operates, communicate real-time parking conditions
to smartphone apps, telling drivers where parking
is available. These connected parking spaces have
delivered tangible outcomes to drivers and to the
city, increasing parking revenue by 2 percent, while
simultaneously decreasing the average cost of
parking by 11 percent and increasing space utilization
by 11 percent.
2
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Hardware is approachable: More businesses and
individuals are able to leverage a vast ecosystem of
tools to design, produce, and distribute hardware
than ever before. It’s no longer necessary to be a tech
?rm to build hardware.
M2M economics: Cost reductions are driving
machine-to-machine (M2M) investments: 45 percent
of global consumer electronics executives cited
declining costs as driving their M2M investments in
2014, up from 27 percent in 2013.
3
Sensor efciency: Sensors are cheaper, smaller, and
more energy efcient than ever before, allowing
more sensors to be installed in more places and
maintained for longer periods of time at the edge of
networks without the need to service or replace them
for two to ?ve years.
M2M standards: Machine-to-machine
communication standards are closer to reaching
maturity, allowing for more localized and real-time
decisions at the edge of networks. In 2014, 22 percent
of organizations had M2M solutions in place, and
42 percent of the rest expect to implement M2M
solutions by 2016; by 2017, 75 percent of
organizations will have M2M as part of their
strategic roadmaps.
4
Ubiquitous bandwidth: High-bandwidth, wired, and
wireless communications are now ubiquitous in most
markets. Trafc from wireless and mobile devices
will be 54 percent of all trafc, exceeding trafc
from wired devices by 2016. By 2018, global ?xed
broadband speeds will reach an average of 42 Mbps,
up from 16 Mbps in 2013.
5
WHY NOW?
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36 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
These are just two glimpses of the emerging
outcome economy in which digital businesses
increasingly sell solutions and results rather than
just products and services. The outcome economy is
de?ned by the ability of companies to create value
by delivering solutions to customers that in turn
lead to quanti?able results. This is made possible
by hardware becoming increasingly intelligent,
otherwise known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
From smart industrial equipment to the bevy of
sensors in the modern smartphone, companies now
have the tools to gain end-to-end insights into the
outcomes that their customers are trying to achieve.
What’s more, this same technology allows companies
to discover the metrics, or measures of value, by
which their customers de?ne success. In efect, these
metrics enable businesses to identify, measure, and
aim for their customers’ desired outcomes.
6
By placing intelligent hardware at the edge—where
the digital and physical worlds intersect—84 percent
of our Vision survey respondents agree they can
gain a deeper level of understanding of both how
products are being used and the detailed outcomes
customers are trying to achieve.
Harbingers of the
outcome economy
The underlying principle of an outcome economy is
not new: marketers have long talked about selling
solutions rather than products. Decades ago, Harvard
University marketing professor Theodore “Ted”
Levitt was famously said to have told his students
that people didn’t want quarter-inch drill bits; they
wanted quarter-inch holes. However, the outcome
economy has been notoriously difcult to grow,
because there have been few efective ways of deeply
and continually discerning what customers want.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Digital technology is now resolving that difculty—so
much so that the outcome economy is no longer just
an aspiration; it is very much here and now. In fact,
it’s a strategic transformation for big companies in
every industry as well as a disruptive opportunity
for startups. The early adopters are tying feedback
from embedded hardware and sensors to their
digital systems, giving them the end-to-end insights
necessary to understand and in?uence outcomes. A
few examples prove the point.
Not long ago, Monsanto acquired Climate Corporation,
a maker of farm intelligence software that integrates
with precision agriculture sensors and systems to
deliver intelligence about current and future weather,
soil, and crop conditions. With the acquisition,
Monsanto is able to ofer growers actionable insights
on how to reduce risks, improve yields, and increase
pro?ts. The agrochemical giant can now not only
recommend the most pro?table crops to plant, but
also what types of seed to buy, when to plant, how
to tend the crops, when to harvest, what yields to
expect, and even what revenue farmers can expect
at the end of the growing season.
7
The end-to-end knowledge that Monsanto can now
gather powers its ability to improve outcomes for
growers. Today, farmers are able to buy ?eld-speci?c
weather-related crop insurance that guarantees
?nancial outcomes and hedges against the risk
presented by increasingly variable and extreme
weather events. It’s not a stretch to envision a future
in which precision irrigation systems, integrated
with these decision support systems, then take
autonomous action based on sensor data of soil
moisture and precise weather forecasts.
In the auto industry, Tesla Motors found a way to use
hardware on the edge to deliver safety outcomes to
consumers beyond what was previously possible. In
late 2013, the luxury electric car maker saw several
instances of the battery packs in its Model S cars
equipped with the Smart Air Suspension option
catching ?re after being punctured by road debris at
highway speeds. Instead of following the traditional
auto industry protocol of issuing a costly recall and
waiting for customers to bring their vehicles in for
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38 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
service, Tesla made use of the intelligent hardware
in every car to distribute a ?rmware update to the
afected cars, which increased their minimum ground
clearance and prevented them from automatically
lowering at freeway speeds.
8
When Tesla devised
a longer-term solution, it returned the original
functionality to the afected vehicles and gave
owners the option of bringing their cars in for a
free retro?t of its sturdier undercarriage armor.
The diagnosis of the problem and improved safety
outcomes for Tesla customers were possible only
because the manufacturer had end-to-end feedback
from and the ability to update the computer systems
in those drivers’ cars.
This emphasis on outcomes is also seen in the
pharmaceuticals sector, where Proteus Digital Health
is focused on improving patient outcomes as a new
way to create value in that industry. The digital
health company integrates a tiny, inert sensor in
the pills it produces; the sensor acts in concert with
a wearable device and mobile app to provide full
“adherence transparency” for patients, healthcare
providers, and payers. Not only can the Proteus
hardware-based system determine when patients
take their medications, but it also can send alerts
and reminders to the individual if they forget to
take a pill. With this approach, Proteus can help
patients increase the efectiveness of their treatment,
demonstrate cost savings over traditional methods of
care, and drive better overall outcomes for patients,
payers, and providers—the proverbial “win-win-win”
situation.
9
There is no shortage of trailblazing examples
across a variety of other industries. The one big
point that bears underlining: edge intelligence—
and the hardware that powers it—is not a digital
phenomenon that bene?ts only high-tech companies.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Hardware at the edge
The levels of insight and control that are the
hallmarks of the outcome economy are only made
possible through the integration of hardware with
existing capabilities. Cloud-based software analytics
and visualization technologies, along with hardware
sensors and increased computing capabilities at the
edge, are all necessary components in the outcome
economy. As intelligence moves steadily and rapidly
toward the network’s edge, it efectively builds a
bridge of data-rich feedback loops that span the “last
mile” between customers and businesses. Companies
that incorporate this next generation of edge
intelligence are seeing their performance per unit
cost soar.
Just one quick example: Nest, the intelligent home
products company, pushed new software to its
Nest Protect devices and consequently halved the
incidence of false ?re alarms—delivering greater
safety and trust outcomes to its customers. The
company’s smoke and carbon monoxide alarms
featured embedded, low-cost, but dormant humidity
sensors. Armed with aggregated anonymous data
from hundreds of thousands of its deployed devices,
Nest was able to re?ne and improve its detection
algorithms. But, to do so, it needed humidity data. So
the next software update sent to products in the ?eld
activated the dormant humidity sensor and improved
the performance of the installed devices.
10
Having this bevy of sensors in a device such
as a smoke alarm would have seemed ?scally
irresponsible just a few years ago, but as unit
shipments have soared, the cost of sensors has
plummeted. Between 2006 and 2013, shipments of
micro-electromechanical sensors (MEMS)—analog
microchips for measuring things in the real world—
for consumer devices have grown at 32 percent year-
over-year to eight billion units.
11
In four years, the
Samsung Galaxy smartphone went from having three
sensors in the ?rst-generation model in 2010 to 10 in
the ?fth-generation model in 2014.
12
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40 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
Sensors are also getting more sensitive and
signi?cantly less expensive. In mid-2014, Broadcom
released the WICED Sense Development Kit. The kit
includes a full software development stack, a mobile
app to view real-time sensor data, and a device
the size of a key fob with ?ve MEMS: gyroscope,
accelerometer, pressure, humidity, and temperature—
all of which retails for $20.
13
Other embedded and
expandable solutions such as Raspberry Pi, Intel
Galileo, and Marvell Kinoma also help makers embed
sensors in just about anything so they can rapidly
prototype and create new hardware-centric
products in far less time and at much lower cost
than ever before.
Cresting the hurdle
of hardware
Leading businesses, large and small, are using
hardware and its ability to bring them closer to their
customers as a diferentiator and as a way to enter
new markets.
But what exactly is meant by “hardware”? In this
context, the de?nition is not con?ned to traditional
IT categories—servers, networking gear, PCs, and so
on. The concept is far broader than that. It includes
the IoT and devices that range from smart washing
machines, wearables, and security cameras to
autonomous cars and intelligent buildings.
Today’s hardware ofers capabilities that parallel the
advancements that were made in software more than
a decade ago and ampli?ed in the as-a-service world.
It is not a stretch to say that as intelligent hardware
becomes cheaper to create and easier to integrate,
it is efectively becoming the new software. In our
survey, nearly two thirds (64 percent) of respondents
indicated their company was either using or
experimenting with emerging channels such as smart
objects (parking meters, smart appliances, robots, etc.),
connected TVs (68 percent), and connected cars
(59 percent) to engage customers.
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Hardware is indeed becoming much easier to make:
it can be designed, produced, and distributed by
small teams with signi?cantly fewer resources than
what was required just 10 years ago. Sociometric
Solutions, a social-sensing analytics ?rm that helps
service-based organizations improve productivity and
drive sales growth, has experienced this ?rsthand.
In 2005, when the company was a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Media Lab startup, its founders
had to write their own operating system for the
name-badge device whose embedded sensors can
track a person’s location, interaction, body movement,
and speech dynamics.
14
Eight years later, when the
company redesigned its badge as an independent
startup, it was able to use an embedded Linux kernel
and add modular capabilities to the software stack,
enabling development to happen four times faster at
less than half the cost.
15
LIFX, an Australian connected
lighting startup, went from concept to hardware,
?rmware, and software to shipping in 12 months.
16
Today, there are more and more resources to help
enterprises master the hardware dimension of the
outcome economy.
Many manufacturers and manufacturing services
companies are setting up specialized units with this
in mind. Hardware accelerators, just one segment
of this movement, are launching at an astonishing
pace: at the start of 2013, there were three top-tier
hardware accelerators globally; just a year and a half
later, there were 15.
17
For example, PCH is a provider of end-to-end product
development and supply chain solutions. In 2013, the
company launched Highway1, a hardware accelerator
designed to help hardware startups navigate the
complexities of launching a new product. Hardware
accelerators such as Highway1 and competitor
Flextronics’ Lab IX are making it possible for startups,
many of which are crowdfunded, to deliver products
to their customers on time and within budget.
The “crowdfunding factor” is important to the
development of intelligent hardware. Between 2011
and 2013, there were 443 hardware campaigns on
Kickstarter and Indiegogo that raised more than
$100,000 apiece. Nearly 10 percent of those have
gone on to raise venture capital, averaging an initial
#t echvi s i on2015
42 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
investment of $8.7 million each.
18
In fact, many new
companies are using their seed rounds of funding to
launch highly professional crowdfunding campaigns
in order to gain valuable insights about product/
market ?t and test pricing strategies. A handful of
notable examples are: Scanadu, Mis?t Wearables,
Oculus VR (Oculus was later acquired by Facebook for
$2 billion), Canary (home security), and LIFX (smart
light bulbs).
Large, long-established enterprises are already
active participants in the push to make hardware
more accessible, usable, and results focused. GE is
an investor in Quirky, an acclaimed marketplace
and crowdsource design community, building
both smart (connected) and traditional products.
For its connected products, Quirky has launched
its own connected device platform, Wink—a type
of standards and certi?cation body with its own
hardware hub that enables smartphones and
other devices to connect with and program Wink-
compatible products as well as smart products from
more than a dozen other brands.
19
This not only
provides a way for devices from dozens of previously
isolated or siloed brands to interoperate, but also
makes it easier to build capacity for intelligence at
the edge.
With every new intelligent device and every new
industry group supporting hardware development,
the promise of the outcome economy comes that
much closer.
Signposts of transformation
at the edge
One of the most signi?cant markers of the shift
toward hardware on the edge is the coalescing
of standards for inter-device communication.
Companies that are keen to engage in the outcome
economy now should tune into the standards
discussion and decide where they want to participate
in de?ning the future of their industry and others.
Sitting on the sidelines at this stage will mean
allowing others to de?ne the way businesses will
compete in the future.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that a standards war has
erupted. Prior to 2014, the only large-scale standards
body in the IoT space was the AllSeen Alliance,
promoting and expanding the use of AllJoyn, a
software framework and core set of system services
that allow edge devices to communicate. In 2014,
a half-dozen more industry groups, certi?cation
bodies, and standards organizations joined the fray.
Several focus on the connected home, while others
concentrate on industrial applications at various
levels of the stack.
It’s still too early to tell which consortia will have
the most in?uence over the long term. But, the
fact that so many groups are coalescing in the
?rst place underscores the importance of the role
that intelligent hardware will play in our collective
future. Enterprises must not wait for a clear winner
to emerge, as the standards landscape will likely be
fragmented for many years. The key will be for each
company to join the consortium that best ?ts its
digital strategies and to learn by collaborating with
fellow participants.
What businesses must
do next
Of course, with every step forward by a Tesla, Monsanto,
or hardware startup, customers are conditioned to
expect more. Yesterday’s automobile ?rmware upgrade
will become tomorrow’s baseline expectation.
The shift toward the IoT powers the outcome
economy and prioritizes data-rich feedback loops
that help companies get to know the outcomes that
their customers want and improve performance on
the metrics that matter. Today, most companies still
make tools that their customers have to con?gure
to create the outcomes they desire. These tools are
usually functional, but they often require much
more work to satisfy the real needs of customers—
such as customizable of-the-shelf software that
still requires a team of developers to con?gure and
maintain. Now, for the ?rst time, companies can gain
quanti?able, end-to-end insights into the outcomes
their customers are trying to achieve and use those
insights to develop signi?cantly more efective products.
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44 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
To take advantage of these new capabilities,
businesses need to start by re-evaluating their
customers’ intended outcomes. They must establish
feedback loops wherever their customers create
value. Then, they need to incorporate the resulting
insights into their business processes and product
management systems.
To begin, businesses would do well to map feedback
loops throughout product and service lifecycles,
paying special attention to how many steps away
from customer outcomes the farthest collection
points are located. The goal is to move feedback
loops as close to customer outcomes as possible in
order to ?gure out what the desired outcomes are
and how to in?uence them. Acting on these insights
will help to re?ne the critical data that needs to be
collected and the types of hardware that need to be
in place to take action—either through mobility or
app solutions (informing a person at the right time)
or machine solutions that automate corrective actions.
When adding new hardware, companies can develop
the competency to build it themselves, as Nike did
with FuelBand, or they can partner with or acquire
companies as Google did with Motorola, Nest, and
Dropcam.
In many cases, new hardware solutions, or the
integration of sensors in existing hardware, will
help to push the edge of the network closer to
the customer. In more challenging cases, new
partnerships or acquisitions might be required to
enable new capabilities at the edge—and to unlock
the greatest of opportunities, wholly new business
models may well be necessary.
The possibilities are far-reaching and can play out across
industries. Consider the utilities sector, for instance.
Companies such as SolarCity are going beyond the
meter to own, install, and operate infrastructure on their
customers’ premises. They have end-to-end insights
and control over the outcomes their customers want.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
In doing so, SolarCity gains long-term, stable cash
?ows and removes the customer payback risks of
renewable energy by guaranteeing economic
outcomes up front.
20
In fact, SolarCity has been so
successful that utilities are starting to see its business
model as a threat to their survival.
The IoT transition presents an opportunity for
utilities and their regulators to pursue a future
where the edges of utility networks stretch beyond
the meter and into the homes and businesses of
their customers. This transition could simultaneously
ofer utilities more control over the grid, while also
delivering improved outcomes for customers and the
environment. Consider Facebook’s Open Compute
Project, an open initiative to crowdsource the design
of energy-efcient servers for data centers, which
was able to realize $1.2 billion in energy savings for
Facebook.
21
If utilities could manage infrastructure
on their customers’ premises, it might make sense
for them to form, say, Open Furnace and Open Air
Conditioning projects, delivering the outcomes
that customers want, as well as the end-to-end
control that utilities need to conserve energy,
manage the grid, and build robust demand response
infrastructure.
This hypothetical opportunity ofers a glimpse of
how disruptive companies can be when they nudge
the edges of their networks just a step or two closer
to their customers. When companies gain end-to-
end feedback loops that extend all the way to the
intersection of the digital and physical worlds, true
disruption can occur. This is the value unlocked by
the outcome economy.
The hardware imperative
The outcome economy upends long-held notions
of how superior products and services are de?ned.
Delivering customer outcomes is a strategy for
sustaining competitive advantage today; it will be
a turnaround strategy in the next few years, and a
survival strategy beyond that.
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46 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
Hardware at the edge is absolutely critical to this
capability and a competency that business leaders
must strive to attain, no matter the industry. From
now on, hardware will no longer be an afterthought—
it will be part of the DNA of every business.
This new capability in hardware will not only add
another layer of insights, but will also help businesses
better understand the context in which their
customers are operating. This combined bene?t will
empower managers to make decisions that directly
impact customer outcomes. Of course, one company
cannot do it all—the new leaders will be those that
can consistently collaborate with others to deliver
excellence across a spectrum of capabilities that
include hardware. Seventy-seven percent of our
Vision survey respondents are already strengthening
their digital businesses by taking part in open
innovation initiatives, using APIs to exchange data,
and leveraging technology platforms to deliver better
outcomes to partners and customers. The companies
that make those kinds of connections—literally and
?guratively—will outrun their rivals today and thrive
for a long time to come.
77
%
Are taking part in open
innovation initiatives, using
APIs to exchange data and
use technology platforms to
deliver better outcomes.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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In the next three months, focus on taking an
inventory of where your business stands, so you can
be more strategic over the longer term.
• Catalog the outcomes your customers are trying
to achieve and map those outcomes to current
product and service oferings.
• Take an inventory of hardware at the edge of your
network; chart the proximity of this hardware to
the customer outcomes cataloged earlier. Use the
intersection of these two mappings to highlight
opportunities to use hardware at the edge for new
feedback loops. Determine if any of these solutions
are repeatable across products and services.
• Evaluate existing product and service feedback
loops by drawing process diagrams for your top 10
oferings, taking careful note of how many steps
away from customer outcomes your furthest data
points are located.
• Identify which Internet of Things (IoT) consortia
might be ideal to accelerate the hardware
ambitions of your business and your ecosystem of
partners; reach out to some existing members to
discuss the bene?ts of participating.
• Build a competitive threat matrix that is focused
on nimble startups. Look at the way they use
intelligent technology at the edge to compete
for your customers. Use what you learn to either
inform your acquisition strategy or propose new
initiatives that will provide best-in-class insight on
how to help your customers achieve their goals.
• Identify opportunities to add sensors or other
hardware to existing products that will enhance
business insight on what customers are trying to
achieve. Evaluate options to transform product
companies into product-service hybrid companies,
with important data-based information services.
• Launch a company-wide innovation challenge to
solicit ideas from your workforce that will highlight
opportunities to migrate from products to services
and services to outcomes. Identify at least three
new business models to pilot.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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48 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
By this time next year, be prepared to embark on a
hardware project, add sensors to existing solutions,
and have pilot projects that can demonstrate insights
gained from a closer relationship to customer outcomes.
• Model the impact of transitioning to outcome-
based revenue streams. Evaluate a roadmap and
pilot the transition of at least one ofering or suite
of oferings to outcome based.
• Evaluate your ability to deliver hardware
solutions at the edge and acquire or partner with
organizations to ?ll capability gaps.
• Appoint an outcome-driven innovation champion to
work with product managers to uncover ways products
can be re?ned to meet unmet customer needs.
• Pilot an outcome-based ofering with a close
customer and create feedback loops within its
business processes that provide near-real-time
insights on the outcomes your product is delivering
to their business.
• Look outside of your company for data sources
that will enhance your understanding of what your
customers are trying to achieve.
• Create a multiyear roadmap for integrating more
hardware and feedback loops with existing products
and services.
• Develop an ecosystem strategy that will allow you
to work with a portfolio of potential partners.
Evaluate if there are opportunities for disruptions
in your industry by moving up the value chain with
hardware-based outcomes.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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The Platform (R)evolution:
De?ning ecosystems,
rede?ning industries
Among the Global 2000, digital industry platforms and
ecosystems are fueling the next wave of breakthrough
innovation and disruptive growth. Increasingly, platform-
based companies are capturing more of the digital economy’s
opportunities for strong growth and pro?tability. Rapid
advances in cloud and mobility not only are eliminating the
technology and cost barriers associated with such platforms,
but also are opening up this new playing ?eld to enterprises
across industries and geographies. In short: platform-based
ecosystems are the new plane of competition.
TREND 3
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50 TREND 3: THE PLATFORM ( R) EVOLUTI ON
Ask a class full of children to draw “John Deere,”
and they will crayon big green tractors and diggers
with yellow wheels. Ask the proverbial man on the
street to describe the John Deere company, and he
will probably talk about the company’s farming
equipment and mention their signature green-
and-yellow tractors. But ask the company’s leaders
how they view Deere, and you will hear another
answer, and language, entirely. They will speak not
of products or brands, but of platforms for meeting
the current and future needs of all those who are
linked to the land…from farmers and ranchers
to landowners and bankers to retail grocers and
government workers…to that class full of children
and the average citizen-consumer.
We’re not referring to conventional equipment
platforms—this harvester, that tractor—but
to an industry technology platform that will
increasingly create new kinds of products, value,
and diferentiation for buyers and sellers across
the entire supply chain. In 2012, the MyJohnDeere
platform was launched to start a wholesale push
toward precision agriculture that would improve
productivity, efciency, and yield. Through this digital
industry platform, John Deere helps agricultural
producers consolidate the management of equipment
information, production data, and farm operations—
and ultimately improve the bottom line.
1
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Digital outpacing GNP: The growth of the digital
economy is outpacing GNP, and the disparity of those
capturing the growth and pro?tability continues
to widen.
Rise of platform-based companies: According to
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2013,
14 of the top 30 global brands by market
capitalization were platform-oriented companies.
2
Digital disruption: Since 2000, 52 percent of the
companies in the Fortune 500 have gone bankrupt,
have been acquired, or have ceased to exist, due in
large part to the disruption of traditional industry
models by digital models.
3
Cloud economics: Advances in cloud, mobile
platforms, and application development are
eliminating the technological and cost barriers
associated with digital industry platforms.
Everyone’s playing ?eld: There will be more than
100 new digital industry platforms from non-tech
companies as early as 2016, according to IDC.
4
Power of APIs: The technologies of application
programming interfaces (APIs)—the secret sauce of
the digital economy—are allowing companies to open
up their data and platforms for others to develop
applications on and to create value.
WHY NOW?
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52 TREND 3: THE PLATFORM ( R) EVOLUTI ON
John Deere is just one of the many companies that
are beginning to deploy a new weapon to grow their
business: the digital industry platform. Thirty-nine
percent of the executives we surveyed are using
industry platforms to integrate data and applications
with digital business partners and collaborate, while
35 percent are experimenting with industry platforms.
Underpinned by the latest wave of digital technologies—
social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and the Internet of
Things (IoT)—this platform is essentially a well-
de?ned technical architecture, ?rm governance, and
set of technology services all focused on enabling the
creation of new industry-speci?c applications. Like
MyJohnDeere, it’s designed to be the blueprint for
how companies will build, connect, and deliver
applications speci?c to industry problems. The
platforms serve as a pool of reusable functionality
and capabilities to make building and evolving these
applications fast and easy—and to help companies
ultimately achieve better business outcomes.
In the digital economy, these platforms also serve
as business model strategies that create competitive
diferentiation. The key characteristic of a platform-
based business is that others outside the company
are creating value for the enterprise—in many
cases enabling entirely new digital models for
the company. It’s true that over the last decade,
technology and Internet-born companies like Apple,
Facebook, and Salesforce.com have dominated the
headlines with their platform-based businesses. But
now, established non-tech industry enterprises are
moving quickly with major strategic initiatives to
become platform-based businesses.
In fact, the platform leaders of tomorrow will go
beyond the technology titans of today. By combining
the power of technology platforms with their
industry expertise, companies are developing new
business models and capabilities crucial to create
disruptive innovation, lead in key markets, and drive
growth. Inherent in these platform models is the
ecosystem they create and harness to deliver value.
39
%
Are using industry
platforms to integrate
data and applications with
digital business partners
and collaborate, while 35%
are experimenting with
industry platforms.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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John Deere’s platform, for example, supports an
ecosystem strategy that has enabled the company to
establish new digital partnerships with bio-chemistry
and agricultural hybridization leaders and to
expand its role in the digitally driven precision
agriculture market.
Building digital industry platforms and developing an
ecosystem strategy is a multiyear process. It’s not a
matter of “if,” but of “when” and “how.” Companies
large and small now see the digital industry platform
and the ecosystems that ?ow from them as the new
competitive mandate, whether they face established
players or digital newcomers.
Early movers like Philips, Home Depot, Kaiser
Permanente, Fiat, and John Deere are placing big bets
today. They understand that surviving and excelling
in the future depends not only on creating a digital
industry platform, but also on revolutionizing their
markets through platform-based ecosystems.
Welcome to the platform age
Digital business platforms mark the beginning of the
platform age. According to Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, “In 2013, 14 of the top 30 global
brands by market capitalization were platform-
oriented companies—companies that created and
now dominate arenas in which buyers, sellers, and
a variety of third parties are connected in real
time.”
5
While many businesses are using digital
initiatives to harness social, mobile, analytics, and
cloud technologies for competitive advantage and
disruption, far-sighted leaders are bringing together
their digital initiatives under platform umbrellas.
Today, it’s not enough to simply develop and deploy
digital tools. Companies must apply their industry
knowledge to build platforms that allow them to
rapidly innovate, develop, and deploy the products
and solutions needed to drive their digital business
strategies. This foundation will enable better
ways of operating, as well as create new kinds of
revenue streams.
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54 TREND 3: THE PLATFORM ( R) EVOLUTI ON
Looking back, this is not the ?rst time we’ve seen
platforms preempt waves of change. Platforms
involving new technologies, new processes, and
new relationships have historically driven major
disruption. Factories were the platforms that drove
the industrial revolution. Trains were the platforms
that revolutionized the transportation of goods and
people, enabling new ecosystems of communities
and commerce. And computer and communication
platforms have driven the information and
connectivity disruptions of the past 30 years.
Today, digital industry platforms are driving the next
major wave of technology and business change. But
why now? The elimination of barriers—in terms of the
technology, cost, and time associated with traditional
IT infrastructure and application development—
is the primary force driving and enabling this
change. According to Gartner, “the cost for service
providers to deliver infrastructure will plunge
almost 40 percent by 2017.”
6
Rapid advances in
digital technologies and the economic leveling that
they create are the major reasons why traditional
companies can now develop their own digital
industry platforms. These enabling technologies
include continuing developments in cloud services,
mobile platforms as front ends, rapid application
development, application programming interfaces
(APIs), and other advances.
While these digital technologies have disrupted
numerous established companies during the past 10
years, digital industry platforms will fuel the acceleration
of disruption during the next three to ?ve years,
leaving less and less time for established companies
to react to change. In case there’s any doubt about
the impermanence of the modern enterprise, since
2000, 52 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500
have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to
exist.
7
This is due in large part to the disruption of
traditional industry models by digital models.
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Digital technologies are coalescing into even more
powerful platforms, accelerating the pace of change,
and becoming the core foundation for the next
major wave of digital disruption across all industries.
According to research ?rm IDC, one-third of leaders
in virtually every industry will be disrupted by
competitors by 2018—newcomers and established—
that leverage platforms to innovate new oferings,
reach new customers, radically expand supply and
go-to-market networks, and disrupt their industries’
cost and pro?t models.
8
In addition, four out of ?ve
respondents (81 percent) in our survey believe that in
the future, industry boundaries will dramatically blur
as platforms reshape industries into interconnected
ecosystems.
Industry leaders with staying power are already
moving in this direction. GE, for example, has
formed a number of strategic relationships with
Amazon Web Services, Pivotal, Softbank, and
Cisco to accelerate the adoption of its GE Predix
software platform, which serves as the foundation
for connecting machines, people and analytics to
the Industrial Internet. Meanwhile, working with
Salesforce.com, Philips has launched HealthSuite
Digital Platform, an aggressive hospital-to-home
connected-care platform. On another front, home
improvement retailers are battling it out for the
do-it-yourself home automation market with a
variety of products and partnerships. Like many large
retailers, Home Depot and others are also looking to
engage with in-store customers through platforms
that are supporting apps, do-it-yourself project help,
and digitized product catalogs. These examples show
how platform leaders are rede?ning the ways that
products and services are created, sold, delivered,
and serviced.
4 out of 5
Believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will
dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into
interconnected ecosystems.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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The technology ingredients
needed for digital industry
platforms
If the digital industry platform is the pressing strategic
technology investment requirement for how companies
determine their future, then how does an enterprise
start building its own digital industry platform?
Most digital industry platforms will emerge on leading
public and hybrid cloud foundations: Microsoft’s
Azure, Amazon Web Services, Force.com, and many
others. Coupled with the maturity and economics of
these cloud services, APIs will become the secret
sauce for the rapid development of creative and
innovative apps and services that help form these
platforms. Put simply, APIs allow applications within
a company—and between a number of companies—
to share data and communicate. One-third of
organizations in our survey (35 percent) report they
are already using partner APIs, and an additional
38 percent are experimenting with them.
Seventy-one percent expect partner APIs to be
broadly adopted across their industries within the
next two years. Often described as “the API
Economy,” the rapid uptake of APIs has become the
glue behind the digital economy—and pro?ciency
with APIs is a core capability for a successful digital
business. Enterprises will also need competencies in
mobile platforms, open-source development, and
real-time computing environments. [See sidebar
Building Blocks of the Digital Industry Platform to
read more about the technology ingredients.]
Shifting the mindset
from “me” to “we”
As enterprises move to platform-based models, their
technology capabilities are rapidly changing—and so
are their ambitions. Innovative companies now view
platforms as a way to increase their capabilities to
attack bigger opportunities and to solve bigger problems.
71
%
Expect partner APIs to be
broadly adopted across
their industries within the
next two years.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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SIDEBAR
While a comprehensive technology blueprint
for platform building is beyond the scope of
Tech Vision, it’s useful to examine some of the
key technology building blocks.
Cloud services—the foundation
The majority of digital industry platforms will
run on leading software-as-a-service (SaaS)
and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology
foundations, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft
Azure, and Salesforce.com Saleforce1. In
the last few years, SaaS/PaaS providers have
matured very rapidly and can now support
market-level digital business initiatives,
including digital industry platforms. That’s
good news for non-tech companies that may
not be poised to develop their own technology
platforms from scratch.
API strategy and architecture—
the digital glue
Familiarity with and pro?ciency in APIs are
now core capabilities for any successful digital
business. While some non-tech executives may
be familiar with APIs, many are only just now
starting to grasp their signi?cance. Once just
a part of the developer’s toolkit, APIs are now
vital for digital industry platforms. Specialists
leading many of the API success stories include
Apigee and Intel’s Mashery.
There are, in fact, diferent types of APIs and
API business cases. For example, private APIs
expose data and functionality from legacy
systems and hybrid platforms for internal use
only to create ecosystems of internal developers
and business users. Although private APIs are
a good ?rst step for focusing expertise and
operational efciencies, they have limited
strategic impact. Thus, some enterprises will move
to partner API programs to deploy the multi-
stakeholder digital business initiatives in digital
industry platforms. Partner APIs are partially
open but still partner-controlled environments,
involving named and dedicated players.
Still other organizations will launch more
open and unrestricted public API programs to
attract the broadest range of digital business
partners, developers, and co-innovators for
the greatest potential returns. However, public
API programs require that enterprises have a
platform, architecture, and governance model
that not only can scale with unlimited API
use, but also can support a broad range of
developers and use cases.
Building Blocks of the Digital Industry Platform
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Open-source and reusable software—
the accelerator
Open-source development and reusable
software has typically driven innovation
and agility for application and product
development among large tech players and
startups. Now, large global enterprises are
getting in on the game as well. Open-source
code and software components are also key to
digital industry platforms, enabling platform
owners and ecosystem partners (developers,
customers, and alliance partners) to create and
share apps to deliver the greatest innovation,
quickly and cost-efectively.
Mobile development platforms—
the digital treasure chest
Mobile development platforms will be
signi?cant to digital industry platforms for
many types of enterprises. Today, iOS and
Android are the dominant mobile development
platforms for low-cost, rapid application
development and rich user experiences.
Companies will use public cloud services, open-
source software, and mobile development
platforms to unlock the treasure chest of
ready-to-assemble components and modules
that help create innovative apps and business
models. Critical to that efort, companies must
architect their technology stack and software
as modules and easy-to-use components to
attract developers. Thus, driving innovation
means truly eliminating complexity in the
platform to enable faster prototyping, testing,
and deployment of new apps.
Internet of Things—the catalyst for
real-time business models
In many cases, digital industry platforms will
be the hub for machine-to-machine (M2M)
and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, which
are already transforming how business works,
and will ultimately impact all industries. Industry
platforms of all kinds, but particularly M2M/
IoT-based initiatives, will increasingly require
real-time technical architectures to enable their
digital relationships. True strategic advantage
will come from having real-time capabilities
in place, so enterprises can attract and create
digital business opportunities and react quickly
to competitive threats. The rapid proliferation
of M2M/IoT will only increase this need for
scalable real-time environments and event-
based processing. Eighty percent of organizations
surveyed agree that companies will move toward
real-time platforms and systems as enterprises
adopt mobility and IoT solutions.
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Kaiser Permanente, for example, is taking on
complex healthcare challenges with a variety of
industry partnerships. Recognizing the critical need
to embrace collaboration to drive the next wave
of healthcare innovation, in 2013 Kaiser launched
Interchange, an API program embracing internal and
external software developers to build applications.
The company has also invested $4 billion (roughly
$444 per member) in building its HealthConnect
platform.
9
A foundational component of Kaiser’s
digital initiatives, the platform provides its clinicians
and nine million members with real-time access
to medical records. It also enables the company
to extend its traditional boundaries by engaging
with members through mobile applications, self-
management services, in-home monitoring, and
virtual consultations. Kaiser’s collaborative digital
initiatives improve the timeliness and quality of
patient care, while reducing operational costs and
optimizing clinicians’ time and expertise.
But platform strategies are not just for enterprises. In
China, the government is using a platform approach
to drive its smart city initiatives. With the population
of China swelling by eight million per year, the
government is turning to technology for help in
solving urgent issues, from trafc ?ow and public
transit to power grid management.
10
But to achieve these ambitious goals, enterprises and
governments both understand that they can’t go it
alone. In the digital era, enterprises are seeing that
their fortunes depend not only on their own
successful eforts, but also on the success of their
platform-driven ecosystems. China’s smart city
platform approach is enabling major providers like
Schneider Electric to address complex urban
transportation, building, and energy management
challenges in an integrated, scalable, and repeatable
platform approach.
11
Running on Microsoft Azure,
Schneider’s StruxureWare open-platform approach
includes an ecosystem of technology and integration
partners. With the “me” to “we” mindset, Schneider is
taking on one of the world’s biggest problems.
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According to a senior executive, “The energy dilemma
facing our world is massive, and our best hope for
solving it for future generations is through partnerships
with other like-minded, innovative companies.”
12
The big shift, however, is not about ?guring out
how to ?t into established ecosystems—it’s about
recognizing that companies in almost every industry
are already beginning the process of creating these
new digital ecosystems. Future success will depend on
the digital relationships that enterprises are creating
today. Sixty percent of the executives we surveyed
plan to engage new digital business partners within
their respective industries over the next two years,
40 percent plan to leverage digital business partners
outside their industry, and 48 percent plan to partner
with digital technology and cloud platform leaders.
In short, business and technology leaders must
master the shift from “me” to “we” in order to bring
these emerging digital ecosystems to life.
The ecosystem as an
innovation sandbox
These new digital ecosystems revolve around
innovation—creating entirely new ways to do business
and connect with partners and customers. It has
never been easy for large, established companies to
continuously innovate. Increasingly, leading companies
have begun to drive innovation in an unusual way:
letting others innovate for them. A majority of
organizations we surveyed (53 percent) indicate they
are now using an open innovation program to
innovate with customers, suppliers or partners. By
opening their platforms to external companies,
organizations can expand their open innovation
eforts even further by creating innovation sandboxes
in which their partners, alliances, startups, and even
consumers can experiment creatively and safely.
60
%
Plan to engage new digital
partners within their
respective industries over
the next two years.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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The results can be impressive. Facebook has unleashed
unprecedented growth and creative output—not to
mention competitive advantage—by allowing both
consumers and companies to innovate on the Facebook
platform. Initially, Facebook’s core business did not
include game development. So, in 2009 the company
engaged with Zynga to build an integrated gaming
experience on the Facebook platform. Zynga’s
FarmVille and CityVille games rapidly went viral. By
2011, 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue came from
Zynga.
13
Looking to follow a similar path to drive
innovation and positive outcomes for its customers,
Philips HealthSuite and GE are intending to open
their platform to companies in 2015.
But using an ecosystem sandbox approach does
more than boost innovation. It also helps to reduce
the risks of moving into uncharted territory by
externally shifting the risk to other enterprises and
third-party developers. Those companies that succeed
will drive further end-user adoption of the platform,
capturing their share of the business and economic
bene?ts. Take Apple’s app store, for example—its top-
grossing mobile game Clash of Clans is generating
well over $1 million a day.
14
Apple gets 30 percent
of the overall net sales.
15
Of course, not every Apple
app will be a huge win. But rarely, if ever, is the
company criticized for the hundreds of thousands
of iPhone apps that didn’t succeed. Apple is not
going to complain, because it never bore the risk of
developing those apps in the ?rst place.
Leveraging the network
multiplier efect
Beyond innovation and new ideas, the ecosystem
is also becoming a key way for companies to grow
faster. By understanding the network multiplier
efect of platform-driven ecosystems, companies can
digitally tap into the many networks of people who
are working toward the same goals. Then they can
leverage these networks to drive sustainable growth
in faster and economically smarter ways.
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In business, the network multiplier efect is about
a product or service becoming more valuable as
its adoption increases. Think telephones. With
only a handful of users to call, the product was
interesting, but not particularly valuable. But being
able to call billions of households all over the world
has revolutionized how people communicate and
do business. With platforms, the network efect
really starts with a company’s internal teams of IT
stakeholders—business units, operations, marketing/
sales, and R&D. Simply put, to get value out of a
platform, it has to be used. But unlike applications of
the past, it’s not just about getting one group to use
it. It’s about enabling and encouraging every group
in the company to adopt it as the best way forward.
Adoption by more users and diferent groups of users
will make the platform more valuable to all.
With ecosystems, enterprises are looking to use their
platforms as a base to create a multi-sided network
efect that generates value for many stakeholders
in a given market—with increased adoption, the
rewards are shared among various platform owners
and stakeholders. Digitally driven companies such as
Salesforce.com have been successfully leveraging the
multi-sided network efect for years. During the past
10 years, more than 100,000 companies have adopted
the Salesforce1 platform, sparking development of
220,000-plus apps. In short, Salesforce has leveraged
its platform-driven ecosystem to drive exponential
value creation and shared rewards for the company,
its customers, and its end users.
16
Apple, Google, and Amazon have long understood
and mastered the network multiplier efect of
ecosystems. The rapid adoption of their platforms
by very broad communities of developers and users
has spurred astonishing value creation and very
high pro?t margins. The economics of the network
multiplier efect have supported double-digit growth
and staggering market caps; rapid adoption and huge
scale have driven pro?tability without diminishing
returns. Leveraging its know-how and capabilities as
the largest online retailer, Amazon pioneered public
cloud services, one of the most transformational
technologies of the past decade. It now serves
hundreds of thousands of business customers.
17
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While Amazon is a dominant force in online
consumer retail, others are leading in enterprise
e-commerce—namely SAP’s Ariba Business Network
and China-based Alibaba. SAP’s Ariba is considered
the world’s largest business network with 1.6
million connected companies and $600 billion
in transactions ?owing through the exchange
annually—outpacing the likes of Amazon and eBay
combined on a transactional basis.
18
In fast pursuit,
fueled by a $25 billion initial public ofering—
the largest IPO ever—Alibaba’s marketplaces are
generating $248 billion on an annual transactional
basis.
19
In a business-to-business (B2B) procurement
world, cloud-based Ariba and Alibaba are leading
examples of the network multiplier efect that
allows trading partners to connect and collaborate
on a common open platform for products and an
expanding range of services—all to the bene?t of SAP
and Alibaba as their networks expand.
Today, the multi-sided network efect takes on
greater economic signi?cance for all kinds of
companies as digital industry platforms proliferate
and interconnect as ecosystems. As more companies
interconnect, more revenue will ?ow through
these ecosystems, providing new growth and
more opportunities for productive and pro?table
partnerships. The starting point for leveraging
the network multiplier efect, then, is to explore
ecosystem options in the digital economy.
Exploring the enterprise’s
role in the digital economy—
ecosystem choices
Once an enterprise sees itself as part of the digital
ecosystem, the next step is to determine its unique
value and role within it. Is it the primary ecosystem
leader and digital industry platform owner? Does
it play more of a secondary or shared role? Does
it connect to another organization’s ecosystem?
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Where and how does it connect its own ecosystem
with other platforms? What are the cross-industry
opportunities? What are the competing ecosystems?
First and foremost, every company will need
to decide whether to create its own platform
ecosystems, partner in the development of platform
ecosystems, or join one or more established
ecosystems. Accordingly, each company will need to
map out its environment, identify relationships and
interconnections to digital partners and developers,
and assess how the digital ecosystem competition is
emerging and evolving.
Platform ecosystems often start with a foundation
of traditional industry partners. Participating
enterprises begin to identify new digital relationships
within their markets—opening up their platforms
to third parties, for instance. That’s the path that
drugstore chain Walgreens chose for launching its
QuickPrints photo-processing API program in 2012,
while seeking to leverage its 8,200 locations and
photo-processing capabilities. Although the program
began with a traditional supplier—Hallmark Cards—
the QuickPrints initiative soon expanded to include
new digital partners and eventually became open
to any developer looking to integrate online photo
services into an app. Learning from its QuickPrints
pilot, Walgreens subsequently expanded its platform
business into a larger ecosystem with its Pharmacy
API program in 2013. The results are impressive:
customers who engage with Walgreens in the store,
online, and using their mobile phones spend six times
more than do store-only customers.
20
This approach
allowed Walgreens to learn through the lower-
risk QuickPrints program with established partner
Hallmark, and then expand to their more complex
Pharmacy API program.
Alternatively, an enterprise can leverage its platform
to engage with new digital partners and developer
communities within its own industry and across other
industries, creating entirely new business models
and forms of value for all ecosystem participants.
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For example, General Motors (GM) is making a broad
cross-industry ecosystem play with its “connected
car” platform. The company has evolved its OnStar
system from a standalone safety and concierge
service to a connected-car platform that includes
multiple partners and a wide range of innovators.
Its emerging connected car platform features real-
time diagnostics, safety/emergency, infotainment,
navigation, insurance modules, multiple third-party
apps, mobile connectivity, and so on. Recently, GM
teamed with AT&T to ofer drivers and passengers
access to 4G LTE network capabilities as part of
AT&T’s next-generation connected-car platform.
21
All
the established automakers are following GM’s lead
with connected car platforms that cross traditional
industry boundaries. Only newcomer Tesla Motors
originated as a platform business, with its software-
de?ned premium electric cars.
As if transcending industry boundaries weren’t
interesting enough, platform-based ecosystems
can have a truly universal impact. They give global
conglomerates the power to establish dominant
digital business positions—sometimes called over-
the-top (OTT) ecosystems. For example, GE has
outlined its vision for the “Industrial Internet”
where intelligent networks of machines operate
through multiple forms of software, sensors, data,
and analytics. To ful?ll this vision, GE launched its
Predix software platform, with very ambitious goals
to provide a common platform across GE businesses.
Employing more than 1,000 developers, designers
and engineers at its software headquarters in the
greater Silicon Valley, GE aims to “software-de?ne”
everything it makes, from trains and planes to
wind turbines and power plants. Its clear objective
is to extend the reach of the company’s vision
and ecosystem well beyond GE itself.
22
Although
GE launched 40 Predictivity solutions internally
and developed oferings powered by Predix, the
company is opening up the platform externally to
all companies.
23
A dominant force in many of its
markets, GE truly understands the value of opening
up its Predix platform and creating innovation with
an ecosystem.
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Conclusion
Digital business platforms are the new blueprint
for how companies will build, connect, and deliver
applications speci?c to industry problems and
opportunities. But platforms themselves are simply
the building blocks of a new concept for creating
value. Their development is evolutionary. Over time,
leading organizations will experiment with many
kinds of platform-centered initiatives, gradually
converging on the platforms that best ?t their needs.
It’s the broader shift toward platform-driven
ecosystems that will be revolutionary. More and more
leading companies already grasp the potential role
that ecosystems will play. They envision entirely new
realms of opportunity by leveraging their evolving
digital platforms in the context of powerful ecosystems
of partners. They know that in the digital era, their
fortunes depend not only on their own eforts and
successes, but also upon the successes of the
ecosystems their platforms can enrich and enable.
Platform-driven ecosystems are not a far-future
idea. The tools and techniques are coming together
today, and the data and sources of data are readily
accessible. What’s needed most is a widespread shift
in mindset toward platform-based ecosystems. The
leaders are making that shift now. An increasingly
urgent challenge for other global players: they must
quickly determine which platforms and ecosystems
will give their organizations a competitive advantage
and de?ne their roles in the digital economy.
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In 100 days, begin to develop a comprehensive
strategy that will lay out the foundation for your
digital industry platform and ecosystem.
• Appoint a champion to build a platform strategy
across your enterprise.
• Task business development and alliance
organizations to catalogue the digital platforms
being ofered by existing partners.
• Organize a governance body to be the gatekeepers
of digital inputs and outputs with external partners.
• Establish or recon?rm a top-down (Board and
C-level), enterprise-wide commitment to your
digital business strategy and industry blueprint.
• Based on your digital business strategy, begin
the design of your industry platform with three
core components: the business model, technical
architecture, and governance model.
• As a major foundational component of your
platform, create a cross-functional business and
technical team to develop your API strategy and
management approach.
• Identify potential digital partners and ecosystem
scenarios in three categories: existing business
partners becoming digital partners, new digital
partners within your industry, and new digital
partners outside your industry.
• Based on your digital business strategy and
potential partner scenarios, consider if you will
initially join, partner, or create your own platform
ecosystem.
• If you likely will build a platform, start identifying
technology partner options for public and hybrid
cloud services.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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By this time next year, start the transition from pilot to
production phases for internal and external programs.
• Execute a multiphase pilot program to launch your
platform and API programs internally and externally.
• Formalize technology partner and cloud services
relationships to support your platform environment.
• Extend internal platform and API developer
programs into a formal external developer program.
• Create and promote a digital sandbox for developers
to design and test apps built on the platform.
• Transition internal API programs into production,
while launching external API pilot programs for one
of your least complex oferings.
• Measure and report progress of the platform and
API programs using a range of business, ?nancial,
and technical metrics.
• Evangelize the initial round of apps and digital
partner solutions built on the pilot platform.
• Embrace opportunities for industry disruptions
by expanding partner strategies to move up the
value chain.
• Think big and broadly about the problems you
can attack and the opportunities you never
thought possible.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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Intelligent Enterprise:
Huge data, smarter
systems—better business
The next level of operational excellence and the next generation
of software services will both emerge from the latest gains in
software intelligence. Until now, increasingly capable software
has been geared to help employees make better and faster
decisions. But with an in?ux of big data—and advances in
processing power, data science, and cognitive technology—
software intelligence is helping machines to make even more,
better informed decisions. Business and technology leaders
must now view software intelligence not as a pilot or a one-
of project, but as an across-the-board functionality—one that
will drive new levels of evolution and discovery, propelling
innovation throughout the enterprise.
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For years now, business and technology leaders have
caught tantalizing glimpses of a new corporate
ideal—a powerful, productive, and exceptionally
intelligent organization whose competitive edge
comes from its pervasive use of data to drive
decisions. In this deeply data-driven model, a
marketing analyst uses big data to decide on an ad
placement, and a veteran executive leverages new
analytics tools to augment a growth strategy. The key
is that users can readily exploit actionable insights
from data to drive better business outcomes across
the enterprise.
At many companies, the quest for this Holy Grail
is under way. Their executive teams can cite the
studies showing that companies with a data-driven
culture are three times more likely to rate themselves
as substantially ahead of their peers in ?nancial
performance.
1
They understand that the usage of
analytics and adoption of a data-driven culture tend
to lead to business success.
2
Indeed, 60 percent of
global businesses believe that big data will improve
their decision-making and competitiveness.
3
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Rising digital complexity: 50 percent of CIOs state
that their chief concerns are solution complexity and
integration difculties.
4
According to 91 percent of
our survey respondents, software intelligence will be
critical to simplifying IT.
Unprecedented data volumes: IDC predicts that by
2020, there will be more than 40 zettabytes of data,
37 percent of which will be considered useful for
analysis (up from 22 percent in 2013).
5
Decreasing cost of storage: Counteracting the rapid
growth of data is the plummeting cost of storing it,
enabling companies to maintain vast data lakes that
can later be used to uncover analytical value. Over
the past 30 years, the cost per gigabyte of hard disk
data storage has halved every 14 months, from more
than $400,000 in 1980 to $0.05 in 2013.
6
Virtually unlimited compute power: Companies
can analyze big data at scale because they now have
access to incredible compute power, largely due to
the availability of cloud services. IDC reports state
that revenue from public cloud services grew at
double-digit rates to reach $45.7 billion in 2013 and
will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
of 23 percent through 2018.
7
Advances in data science: Improvements in deep-
learning and cognitive-computing technologies
are driving enterprise adoption. Advancements
in more human-like qualities, such as speech and
image recognition and reasoning capabilities, are
enabling companies to answer unclear and unde?ned
questions better and faster than ever before.
WHY NOW?
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However, the plain fact is that most enterprises are
struggling to fully utilize their data—they wrestle not
only with the volume of data now available to them,
but also with the many complexities of identifying,
capturing, categorizing, analyzing, and sharing it
throughout the data supply chain. Half of all chief
information ofcers concede that their biggest
concerns are solution complexity and integration
difculties.
8
Only 28 percent of businesses believe
that they are generating strategic value from the
data they collect, and nearly 40 percent admit that
they need a plan to take advantage of big data.
9
So, what will it take for businesses to achieve this
ideal—or at least get much closer to it?
The answer lies in realizing that more decisions are
being made by software—and that many more decisions
can and should be entrusted to machines. But as
software takes on more decision-making duties, it must
be made smarter, too. Only then can the enterprise
consider itself truly data driven and intelligent.
However, the opportunities do not end there. With
increased intelligence, software can also self-evolve
and make novel discoveries that drive entirely new
levels of innovation. Now, more than ever, businesses
must make a renewed investment in machines and
their digital intelligence—to propel data-driven
outcomes as well as opportunities for innovation.
This is the era of software intelligence, in which
applications and tools take on more human-like
intelligence. Sure, researchers have been working on
intelligent systems for years, but these technologies
have only recently become viable—the consequence
of today’s mix of vast amounts of data, cheap
storage, tremendously scalable computing, and
advanced data science.
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Just how is “software intelligence” de?ned? Isn’t all
software “intelligent” to some extent? At its most
basic, the term describes a class of technologies that
enables machines to make decisions—to turn on the
heat when the temperature drops below 70 degrees,
for example. The homeowner’s thermostat setting
becomes the software’s rule. Today’s more intelligent
thermostats “learn” the homeowner’s behavior,
essentially de?ning and evolving the rules themselves—
monitoring the homeowner’s schedule, say, and
automatically lowering the temperature from just
before she leaves in the morning until just before
she returns.
But software intelligence is now taking such
capabilities much further. Staying with our
thermostat example, the next generation of devices
will be able to “discover” useful connections that the
homeowner might not even be aware of herself; they
might learn, for instance, that 15 minutes after she
turns on the treadmill, she always turns of the heat,
and then take over that action for her.
These kinds of capabilities—to make decisions, to self-
evolve, and to discover—represent the foundational
aspects of software intelligence today. Tomorrow,
cognitive computing will take this to an even
greater level, extending a machine’s ability to sense,
comprehend, and act. With access to even more data
and cognitive reasoning capabilities, a machine could
perceive that its user is running a fever, understand
that she’s getting sick, and then turn up the heat—all
while diagnosing her illness and putting her in touch
with a healthcare provider.
Software intelligence must now be seen as a core
capability—one that not only can elevate operational
excellence throughout the organization, but also can
power innovation. Increasingly, decisions made solely
by software—whether they are to determine how
best to provide customer support or how to optimize
the supply chain—will determine the success or
failure of companies. Now, it’s up to business leaders
to ensure that the software is intelligent enough to
consistently make the right decisions.
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An unexpected catalyst for
more intelligent software
The catalysts for the software intelligence push
are not hard to ?nd. To be sure, there have been
decreases in data storage costs, increases in
processing power, and advances in data science. But
one notable driver comes from a place most may
not expect: the data itself. In recent years, there has
been an explosion of data—much of it due to the
proliferation of connected devices. Researchers report
that more data has been created in the last two years
than in all of human history, and market research
?rm IDC notes in 2014, the digital universe equaled
1.7 megabytes a minute for every person on Earth.
IDC predicts the total size of the digital universe
will reach 44 zettabytes of data in 2020. Roughly
10 percent of that data will come from 32 billion
connected devices—more than twice as many as there
are now.
10
Over the past year, respondents in our
survey indicate the volume of data managed by
their organizations grew steadily by an average of
55 percent.
The consequence: every company in every industry
now has access to astounding amounts of data
that allow software to increase its intelligence
signi?cantly. Machines are uniquely able to capitalize
on the scale of big data so that statistical algorithms
can improve their accuracy and discover entirely
new associations among the data—associations that
might not have been possible to hypothesize. Having
more data usually beats using a better algorithm, and
this enables big data to catapult the performance of
even relatively simple algorithms to new heights of
intelligence.
11
Consider language translation. For years, humans
have struggled to create accurate translation systems
in order to program the vast rules and logic of
language into machines. It’s not the words themselves
that are hard to translate—it’s the grammar and the
subtle, nuanced idiosyncrasies typical of most
languages that make it so challenging. Yet, engineers
are now making good headway.
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Google Translate has made leaps and bounds in what
is possible in language translation today, and it has
done so by exploiting big data—scouring hundreds of
millions of documents and billions of word sequences
to determine the best translations. By detecting
patterns in documents that have already been
translated by human translators, Google Translate can
make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate
translation should be. Google Translate can translate
text between 80 diferent languages and serves
200 million people daily, making it one of the best
tools available today.
12
Now imagine how the superabundance of data
can and will drive increasingly useful insights for
companies to make more informed business decisions
about their customers, products, competitors, and
markets. Consider Shazam, the music identi?cation
service, for example. Shazam impresses its many users
with its ability to “listen” to a song and scan countless
data sets to pinpoint the name of the song and the
artist in seconds. But the software intelligence behind
Shazam’s business model is driving much more than
foot-tapping rhythms. It is typically able to discover
hit songs 33 days before they reach the top of the
Billboard Hot 100. The “leading indicator” of this is
“app click” data—data that details how often users
try to identify a particular song playing around them.
The demand for these insights is so great that Shazam
is developing a “dashboard” feature for purchase.
13
By accessing that dashboard, other entities, such as
record labels and concert promoters, can increase
sales and better plan concert tours—efectively using
big data to drive big revenue.
A software intelligence
maturity curve
Software intelligence encompasses a wide range of
arti?cial intelligence technologies that ingest data to
trigger automatic action. These technologies range
from rule-based programming to machine learning,
deep learning, and cognitive computing. It also
includes specialty technology areas such as natural
language processing (NLP) for speech capabilities, as
well as computer vision for image recognition.
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This is just a small sample of terms from the wide
spectrum of software intelligence—terms that can be
highly technical, nuanced, and, frankly, misunderstood
by many. Hyperbolic coverage by the media of areas
such as deep learning has hindered as much as it has
helped; to the proverbial man in the street, the ?eld
of software intelligence is probably as murky as ever.
However, what is becoming clear to more and more
business and technology leaders is that companies
can use software intelligence to achieve real, tangible
business bene?ts.
From increasing worker productivity to improving
software functionality and discovering new
customers, intelligent software can be put to work
to tackle perennial business problems. It is an across-
the-board enabler of operational excellence and
innovative software services that is applicable across
many business functions.
Accenture envisions a way to make sense of these
new capabilities: a software intelligence maturity
curve that starts with automation, moves into
machine learning, and then extends to cognitive
computing. Each stage of this maturity curve merits
a closer look.
A foundation in automation
Enterprises understand that it is to their strategic
advantage to simplify and streamline many aspects
of their operations. Consider the complexity being
created by rising data volumes alone. In our Vision
survey, a majority of organizations (55 percent)
indicate the degree to which it is a challenge to
manage data at their organization is either very or
extremely challenging. Out of necessity, enterprises
are automating many of their tasks to keep up.
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For decades, rule-based algorithms have been the
norm to enable businesses to make more decisions,
faster. They help enterprises deal with their growing
data and IT systems by translating business logic
into programmable rules. These types of algorithms
automate basic processes—such as ?ltering unwanted
email into a spam folder or monitoring corporate
networks for problems—adding much-needed
horsepower to longstanding data challenges.
Rule-based programming continues to be used by
new applications that address modern technical
challenges. Just look at what is happening in today’s
data centers, which are becoming far larger and
more complex than ever in order to handle big
data. The setup, con?guration, and management
of these massive systems are so cumbersome that
open-source tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
and Salt are proving invaluable for automating and
simplifying the necessary IT infrastructure tasks.
14
To illustrate, Puppet Labs has helped cloud solutions
provider Morphlabs to perform any kind of system
con?guration in hours rather than days or weeks
by implementing its con?guration management
automation tool.
15
These types of solutions provide
the speed and scale necessary to realize and
capitalize on data insights throughout the enterprise.
A company’s ?rst foray into software intelligence
should be to identify tedious, time-consuming
tasks that follow consistent business processes
and to prioritize those as top candidates for rule-
based automation. London Heathrow Airport, for
instance, chose to automate its airport operations
and was able to implement the ?rst stage with the
Pegasystems’ Applications Platform in just nine weeks
with substantial bene?ts—including an increase in
on-time departures from 68 to 85 percent.
16
Rule-based automation is a powerful driver of
intelligence that many companies have yet to fully
embrace. Once they do, however, they will seek an
even better response to the increasingly dynamic
nature of today’s businesses—beyond hard-coded rules.
A new class of self-evolving applications promises to
fundamentally change software development.
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Software that learns
Much of the power of software intelligence comes
from its ability to self-evolve and make novel
discoveries. It enables software to stay up to date
without relying on manual updates, and it uncovers
opportunities to attract customers with new and
improved products and services, respectively.
Businesses that leverage massive amounts of data
to identify and de?ne associations—the foundations
of machine learning—will gain an edge over their
competitors.
Machine learning is not a single technology or
technique but rather a ?eld of computational
science that encompasses modern mathematics,
various statistical techniques including clustering
trees, probability theory, dynamic systems, and
deep learning, to name a few of its key areas. Data
scientists pull from all of these areas to determine
the set of algorithms—from Bayesian networks to
probabilistic trees, or an ensemble—that comprise
the best ?t for the use case. But what all of these
algorithms have in common is that they learn from
data and apply this knowledge to future situations.
In short, they acquire experience, which enables their
software to self-evolve and make discoveries for
innovation. Forty-one percent of those we surveyed
indicated they are using machine learning. Another
36 percent are experimenting with it and 16 percent
are considering using it.
IT groups are now under immense pressure to rapidly
produce software products and services and to keep
them up to date. DevOps has become the norm,
with teams deploying code up to 30 times more
frequently than before.
17
But quicker iterations of
smaller updates and never-ending project lifecycles
can’t go on forever. Machine learning provides the
answer, easing the load. By de?nition, it learns from
data to discover connections, so it has the distinct
advantage of evolving automatically with changes
in data—efectively enabling software to better keep
pace with the rising expectations of its users.
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Take Net?ix, the media streaming company
that revolutionized its industry by deploying a
sophisticated recommendation engine with machine
learning at its core.
18
With more than 30 million
subscribers, Net?ix relies on its algorithms to discover
connections between consumers’ prior activities
and the likelihood of their next viewing.
19
If a user
watches the gruesome action movies From Dusk Till
Dawn and 300, for example, Net?ix can learn from
these unique data points to recommend a speci?c
category of movies: Visually Striking Violent Action
& Adventure. By using this approach, machines
make intelligent decisions to provide personalized
recommendations for every user—ultimately driving
about 75 percent of viewer activity.
20
Businesses in other industries are making similar
moves. In the energy sector, an oil and gas
production company has deployed machine learning
to add real-time situational awareness to its facility-
management system. By continuously reviewing tens
of thousands of data streams on operating conditions
along the company’s pipelines, the software learns
what normal behavior looks like. It then evolves
by itself to ?ag unexpected patterns within the
data, raising alerts in real-time about unexpected
situations before they become critical events. This
makes the pipeline operations safer and more
pro?table, too.
21
Properly utilized, machine learning can add even
more value. Not only can it self-evolve, but it can
discover entirely new associations—ones that almost
certainly could not have been made by humans
alone. Typically, these unprecedented connections are
highly predictive in nature, empowering enterprises
to acquire the insights that enable them to adapt—
and thus develop new products and enter new
markets before their competitors do.
The predictive intelligence engine 6Sense uses
machine learning to improve sales efectiveness in
business-to-business scenarios. Fueled by volumes of
data and powered by advanced analytics, 6Sense’s
software helps sales and marketing teams discover
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new prospects, identify the best ways to reach
them, and predict their propensity to buy with up to
80 percent accuracy—efectively enabling companies
to market to customers they don’t yet have.
22
Not only does this constitute a new take on lead
discovery, but it also gives users the foresight to
adapt to future customers’ interests and needs.
For many companies, machine learning may be a
daunting challenge, but now is the time to start
investing—to educate talented employees, hire
technical experts, and implement the necessary
technologies. Forward-looking companies will
identify their data assets, leverage new ones, and
start to explore the data they already have in search
of hidden insights. They will start small and add
on until machine learning is pervasive throughout
the enterprise.
Scaling intelligence through
cognitive computing
The last stage of the maturity curve of software
intelligence is cognitive computing. It is the
culmination of rule-based, machine-learning, and
other advanced technologies used to achieve the
highest levels of contextual software intelligence
at scale. Cognitive computing software can sense,
comprehend, and act. In other words, it enables
computers to perceive the world, analyze and
understand the information collected, and make
informed decisions to take action.
With the ability to utilize much more data and
acquire many more insights for greater contextual
understanding, cognitive computing systems
can start to solve problems that are particularly
ambiguous, unclear, and unde?ned—problems which,
thus far, have been left solely to the formidable
cognitive capabilities of humans.
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Often, there may not be a “right” answer to these
types of questions; but by exploiting its unique
reasoning capabilities, cognitive computing software
can help determine the “best” answer. This unique
approach opens the doors to solving entirely new
problems and challenges facing businesses every day—
to further drive intelligence throughout the enterprise.
Some recent advances in cognitive computing come
from improvements in deep learning—a multilayer
approach to machine learning inspired by biological
neural networks. Notably, many of these deep-learning
successes have also come through unsupervised-
learning methods—again, another sub-category of
machine learning—where unlabeled data, without
tags or other metadata, is used. Both deep-learning
and unsupervised-learning methods have signi?cantly
pushed the boundaries of NLP for speech recognition
and propelled the capabilities of computer vision for
image recognition—both of which are critical to
achieving a more human-like interface.
IBM has made one of the largest investments in
cognitive computing today, putting $1 billion
toward its Watson Group early in 2014. Defeating
two champions of the TV game show Jeopardy! in
2011 was just the beginning; Watson is now taking
on pertinent vertical industry challenges, with an
emphasis on the healthcare industry. According to
IBM chief executive Virginia Rometty, Watson has the
potential to “change the face of healthcare”—helping
doctors deliver better, more personalized care in
situations that may not be well de?ned or clear.
23
The
ultimate goal is for Watson to continue to deepen its
knowledge and expand its breadth of expertise—to
achieve the Holy Grail of software intelligence.
Amelia, IPsoft’s virtual agent, is another example
of the cognitive computing software in use today.
“She” can be deployed quickly, using an instruction
manual for a call center representative, say. But
the software’s strengths lie in its ability to learn
from experience, understand context, and provide
a “human touch.” The impact that Amelia has on
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businesses is immediate and substantial—so much
so that IPsoft guarantees a 30 percent increase in IT
efciency in 90 days.
24
It’s easy to extrapolate: Amelia
could provide ?nancial trading support or become an
expert advisor for ?eld engineers in remote locations,
for instance.
While cognitive computing technologies may be
out of reach for many companies today, far-sighted
business and technology leaders will begin to elevate
the software intelligence of their organizations by
raising expectations for their current solutions and
then building in communication capabilities, such as
NLP or image recognition. They will start by focusing
on small, better-de?ned use cases and then gradually
broaden their scope—while simultaneously providing
more data to increase their systems’ contextual
understanding—to tackle more ambiguous questions
and daunting challenges.
Caution and collaboration
Of course, the power and potential of software
intelligence do not come without some risks. An
over-reliance on data—regardless of how smart the
underlying algorithms used to process it are—can
result in narrow interpretations that inhibit rather
than enable innovation. Consider Street Bump, a
smartphone app used in Boston, Massachusetts,
to collect data on potholes using a phone’s
accelerometer and GPS and submitting the data
to the city to initiate repairs. While the concept
was great, the problem was its scope: because
smartphone owners tended to have higher incomes, a
majority of the potholes being reported were in more
afuent sections of town—which was an inaccurate
representation of the needs across the city.
25
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The good news is that companies can work around—
and perhaps even overcome—these limitations
by building new levels of collaboration between
humans and computers. Machines can compute
with exceptional precision and scale, and will get
better and better at doing so. But humans excel at
thinking creatively and in context, such that they can
question and improve the conclusions of intelligent
software. According to 78 percent of our survey
respondents, successful businesses will manage
employees alongside intelligent machines—ensuring
collaboration between the two. Leading companies
will ensure increased collaboration between their
employees and machines in a new blended workforce.
[See Workforce Reimagined to read more about how
businesses should reimagine the new people-plus-
machine workforce.]
The power of pervasive
intelligence
Used wisely and carefully, the power of software
intelligence can give companies the operational
excellence and innovative edge they need—because
machines have the speed and scale, and now the
intelligence, to make decisions that will have a real
impact on the business. Companies will start by
automating many of the tedious manual processes
that inhibit agility as they pursue the data-driven
enterprise. And once achieved, they will realize
it is just the beginning—the truly intelligent
enterprise will unlock many more opportunities.
Machine-learning technologies will pave the way
for intelligent software to evolve itself to keep
pace with technology. They will also make novel
discoveries that enable companies to adapt to the
ever-changing digital world. Cognitive computing
will go one step further to capitalize on its unique
reasoning capabilities to address questions that were
once unanswerable due to their ambiguity and lack
of clarity.
78
%
Believe successful
businesses will manage
employees alongside
intelligent machines—
ensuring collaboration
between the two.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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Put simply, businesses that harness the power
and potential of software intelligence will run
more efciently, innovate more rapidly, and serve
customers more efectively. Visionary companies
will ?nd new ways to get smart software out of the
lab and into as many practical scenarios as possible,
thereby spurring innovation and raising the bar of
operating performance across their organizations.
Software intelligence is a game-changer for every
business in every industry. Ignoring that fact is,
simply, not very smart.
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Over the next three months, develop a comprehensive
understanding of software intelligence, including
how it is currently used and could best be used in
your company.
• Identify the software intelligence currently in use
by your company to provide a capabilities and gap
analysis. Understand the advantages that software
intelligence provides, from making decisions
to self-evolution and discovering opportunities
for innovation.
• Take an inventory of labor-intensive business
processes and identify appropriate opportunities
to invest in automation and machine-learning
capabilities that can help to improve operational
capabilities and scale analytics.
• Identify speci?c applications that require frequent
and manual updates, data extracts, and/or a
high degree of personalization. If the application
relies on data, classify it as a top candidate for
software intelligence, such as machine learning
for self-evolution.
• Map these examples/use cases against your current
business processes and corporate strategy to
prioritize speci?c opportunities—to catch up or
gain new advantages.
• Cultivate your data science talent—develop a
plan to build, buy, and/or partner to support
your machine-learning and advanced-analytics
know-how.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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A year from now, begin to permeate software
intelligence throughout your enterprise—by proving
rule-based automation capabilities, implementing new
machine-learning technologies, and understanding
the latest cognitive computing trends.
• Review your top candidates for software
intelligence as determined in the 100-day plan.
Implement an automation technology that
addresses one of these use cases. Quantify its
business impact and use those cost savings to
justify the next project(s).
• Develop machine learning skills by implementing
a machine-learning software solution that utilizes
a de?ned data set for a very speci?c use case
and bene?ts from advanced analytics, such as a
personalization application.
• Pilot a machine-learning solution that discovers
new data associations. Review the outcomes with
an eye toward identifying new opportunities for
growth and innovation, such as a new customer
segment or creating a new product.
• Review your machine-learning use cases with a
questioning eye. Set up a quality assurance process
to support or refute the conclusions being drawn
and subsequent actions taken. Have your data
scientists con?rm that the datasets are complete
and accurate and that the algorithms are appropriate.
• Create a training program to ensure that your
data scientists are educated on the latest deep-
learning and cognitive-computing technologies,
speci?cally in natural language processing and
image recognition. Give them time to research
and develop potential solutions with these new
technologies.
• Establish a top-down strategic commitment to
software intelligence and data science, including
R&D investment, innovation programs, and
production development.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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Workforce Reimagined:
Collaboration at the
intersection of humans
and machines
The push to go digital is amplifying the need for humans
and machines to do more, together. Advances in natural
interfaces, wearable devices, and smart machines will present
new opportunities for companies to empower their workers
through technology. This will also surface new challenges
in managing a collaborative workforce composed of both
people and machines. Successful businesses will recognize
the bene?ts of human talent and intelligent technology
working side by side in collaboration—and they will embrace
them both as critical members of the reimagined workforce.
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Say hello to technology, the newest employee in your
workforce. It’s smarter than ever and quick, too, but
technology still needs training and teammates; it can’t
work alone—nor should it. According to 77 percent
of the executives we surveyed, within three years,
companies will need to focus on training their machines
as much as they do on training their people (e.g., using
intelligent software, algorithms, and machine learning).
When people and machines work together, they have
the potential to produce better outputs than either
could separately. Businesses must recognize that
technology is no longer just a set of tools—it is now
a partner in a new collaborative workforce.
In fact, collaborative technology is already making
everyday lives easier. Consider the semi-autonomous
cars from manufacturers like Audi, In?niti, Mercedes-
Benz, General Motors, and Toyota. Each has
announced self-driving navigation features that
will enhance their cars and assist drivers, making
their experiences better, easier, and safer all around.
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Maturing technology: Advances in natural language
processing (NLP) are making it much easier for
humans to interact naturally with technology and
machines. NLP is expected to grow rapidly to a
$10 billion market by 2018.
1
Advances in wearable
computing are allowing workers to integrate more
technology seamlessly into their work?ows.
Human-like interactions: Baidu chief scientist
Andrew Ng predicts that voice and image searches on
Baidu will surpass text queries within ?ve years—an
indication of growing expectations for more human-
like interactions with intelligent software.
2
Fast ROI: Gartner predicts that “by 2018, the total
cost of ownership for business operations will be
30 percent lower than today because of the wider
use of smart machines and industrialized services.”
3
Improved efciency: Gartner forecasts that in 2017,
savings in the ?eld service industry will increase
$1 billion due to smartglasses.
4
Important use cases such as worker safety:
Most of the resources that are easily accessible from
the earth (oil & gas, minerals, energy) have been
extracted. Resource companies are sending humans
to more and more dangerous missions in more
and more remote regions of the Earth. The need
for robots to work together with humans in such
situations is becoming more pronounced.
WHY NOW?
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If navigating in heavy urban trafc, for instance,
Mercedes-Benz S-Class drivers in Europe can press
a button on the car’s steering wheel to activate
Intelligent Drive, enabling the system to temporarily
take over braking, steering, and acceleration up to
37 miles per hour.
5
Of course, this feature doesn’t
ofer anything new that a human driver can’t
already do, but it takes advantage of the machine’s
unique capabilities to avoid becoming fatigued
or distracted—thus increasing vehicle safety while
easing the burden of driving in trafc.
But in the enterprise, human and machine
collaboration goes beyond just eliminating fatigue
or making experiences more pleasant—it provides
organizations with the opportunity to tackle even
greater challenges. For example, the US space agency
NASA is teaming astronauts and robots together to
face the difcult and dangerous task of cleaning up
derelict satellites. Out?tted with advanced analytics
algorithms and stereoscopic cameras, robot spheres
are analyzing space junk to quickly map each piece’s
spin, velocity, trajectory, and center of mass—
allowing astronauts to capture it safely.
6
These examples demonstrate just how efective
people and machines can be when they work
together—and more and more companies are
realizing this every day. It is now possible to use
advances in speech recognition, natural language
processing, wearable technology, and machines to
access the power of intelligent software throughout
the decision-making process [see The Intelligent
Enterprise], enabling humans to leverage technology
to produce better business outputs. The companies
that are successfully embracing the reimagined
workforce—in which people and machines efectively
work as a collaborative team—are obtaining a
competitive edge in this new digital world.
Look again at the scenarios from NASA and
Mercedes-Benz. Most focus on the advanced
software and robotics that drive these machines to
act intelligently on their own. However, of equal
note are the advancements in how people interact
with technology.
77
%
Believe that within the next
three years, companies will
need to focus equally on
training their people and
their machines.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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In the journalism ?eld, for instance, reporters at the
Los Angeles Times are now working with intelligent
software to write articles. QuakeBot is one such
program that writes ?rst drafts of reports when an
earthquake hits.
7
It extracts earthquake data from a
United States Geological Survey report and plugs it
into a pre-written template. From there, the article
is turned over to a human editor who veri?es that
the information is correct, makes any edits, and
immediately publishes it. In addition to making
the reporting process much easier for the writer,
this teamwork greatly improves the speed between
earthquake occurrence and article publication. In one
instance, QuakeBot enabled an article to be posted
within three minutes—making the Los Angeles Times
the ?rst media outlet to report on the earthquake.
8
The next generation of businesses will be composed
of people and technology working side by side to
achieve better results and tackle bigger challenges.
To best embrace this shift, companies will have to
train their employees to collaborate efectively with
technology—and, in some cases, teach and guide
the technology as if it were an apprentice. Smart
machines now have the ability to interact with, train,
and learn from humans, and this enables them to
perform better over time. By creating a positive cycle
of collaboration between humans and machines,
enterprises can drastically improve the outputs
of both and embrace the digital age with a
reimagined workforce.
The augmented workforce
The development of more natural interfaces for
interacting with technology is making it more
acceptable to turn to machines for assistance today.
But it doesn’t have to be a robot that augments your
workforce efciency. By bringing the digital into
the physical world, even wearables are transforming
people into “better versions” of themselves.
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And it doesn’t stop there. Humans are using
machines to take on more challenging physical tasks
while achieving greater operational efciency. These
new capabilities are allowing companies to create
new experiences where humans and machines are
accomplishing more together than either could
have on their own. The result? Companies are
providing capabilities that enable their employees
to collaborate productively with technology, and
technology is starting to act as a real member of
the workforce.
Newer and more natural interfaces
It seems straightforward, but you can’t work with
machines if you can’t communicate with them. The
developments in how people interface with machines
are a driving force behind the new wave of human-
computer collaboration seen in the enterprise.
Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and
speech recognition are making it much easier for
humans to interact naturally with technology and
machines—and companies are starting to recognize
this value. The market for NLP is expected to grow
from $3.8 billion in 2013 to $9.9 billion in 2018, a
compounded annual growth rate of 21.1 percent over
that period.
9
Voice searches on mobile phones that use Apple’s
Siri or Google Now are increasing in popularity.
That’s because speech recognition is more reliable
than ever. By making unstructured conversations,
written or spoken, searchable in real-time, NLP is
acting as the enabler behind speech recognition.
Additionally, as users grant these mobile intelligent
assistants access to contextual data, they receive
more relevant suggestions. Take Google Now, which
makes inferences based upon voice and written
searches and con?rmation messages sent to Gmail.
By analyzing contextual clues and incorporating
user feedback—for relevancy and accuracy—tools like
Google Now learn what is useful and, for example,
notify users of ?ight times for itineraries found in
email. Immediate user feedback not only enables
Google Now to evolve as an improved assistant, but
also grants Google the ability to act as a trusted
mobile advisor to every user.
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Expect Labs’ MindMeld is another application
using NLP with the potential to change how huge
segments of the workforce operate. The “anticipatory
computing” app listens to voice conversations and
surfaces relevant information for its users in real-
time. Expect Labs has already released the MindMeld
API to the public, enabling other apps to build in
this functionality.
10
Consider the advantage this
could create for customer service agents: MindMeld
technology could provide support by suggesting
efective responses for the agent, even as a customer
is still explaining the issue. Not only does this
human-machine collaboration enhance the customer
experience, a pain point for many, but it can also
reduce call time, make the agent more efective,
and improve overall efciency for the call center
by allowing the customer service agent to focus on
activities only humans can do.
The power of wearables
But the interfaces between people and machines
are evolving in many more ways than just how both
sides communicate. Physical enhancements provided
by smart devices are helping to bridge the digital
and physical worlds. Wearable technology is now
collecting more data via sensors, communicating
more information via displays, and truly augmenting
a person’s physical capabilities. Leveraging wearable
devices that augment action allows companies to
equip their employees with the technology they
need to do better work, while improving operational
efciency and safety.
Physical sensors are being built into wearable systems
to collect information on their surroundings—which
can potentially save lives in hazardous situations.
Forty percent of organizations in our survey are
considering using sensors to augment their workforce
for this intelligence gathering purpose. For instance,
Accenture’s Life Safety Solution out?ts workers in
oil and gas re?neries or chemical plants with a lapel-
based wireless four-gas detector, in addition to a
40
%
Are considering using sensors
to gather intelligence and
equip their workforce with
more insights.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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panic button and a motion sensor.
11
By continuously
monitoring the environment, companies can mitigate
risks and improve worker safety. In a similar vein,
Caterpillar’s telematics solutions use video analytics
to detect when heavy machinery operators are
drowsy.
12
In both cases, these sensors are monitoring
employees and their environments in order to alert
them to unsafe conditions.
Wearable technology can provide further value
by displaying critical information in unobtrusive
ways. To illustrate, last year Accenture and Philips
demonstrated how a doctor wearing Google Glass in
an operating room could use the display to monitor
a patient’s vital signs while performing surgical
procedures, all without turning away from the
patient.
13
And surgeons at Indiana University Health
Methodist Hospital have used Google Glass assistance
during the removal of abdominal tumors.
14
Surgeons
were able to look directly at their patients and keep
their hands on critical tasks, all while maintaining a
constant view of vital patient data as well. In these
cases, augmented devices have provided doctors
with additional degrees of freedom, portability, and
unprecedented contextual information. Taking this
one step further, some hospitals are making plans
to improve training by using cameras to stream and
record live surgeries, as seen through the eyes—and
smart glasses—of a surgeon.
Companies may also opt to use wearable technology
in order to magnify a person’s physical capabilities
and increase worker productivity. In fact, the US
military is already in advanced tests with so-called
exoskeletons—robotic frameworks that people wear
to augment their own physical strength. To assist
with the construction and maintenance of its ships,
the US Navy purchased two Lockheed exoskeletons—
intelligent machines that can support heavy assembly
machinery and handle loads of up to 36 pounds.
Early tests show that the exoskeleton has increased
productivity from two to 27 times, depending on the
task.
15
Now, these adaptable machines are reaching
manufacturing ?oors, as well, optimizing company
savings on production costs.
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Human and machine, side by side
As the ?eld of robotics continues to advance,
more machines are becoming capable of not just
communicating and augmenting human employees,
but also physically working side by side with them.
Many enterprises have learned that, while machines
excel at precision, scale, and consistency, humans are
better suited for creativity, contextual understanding,
and complex communications. Now, companies can
have a division of labor that caters to the strengths
of each—and appropriately distributes tasks to
maximize the impact of both.
Already, there are many compelling examples
of humans and machines working together to
boost process productivity. Close to one-third of
organizations in our survey are considering robotics
to automate business and industrial processes. In an
auto manufacturing trial, a human-robot team was
able to assemble the frame of a car 10 times faster
than a team of three professionals. How? For simple
welds, a robot with a video projector would show a
human where to place a speci?c part; then the robot
would make perfect welds in ?ve seconds per weld.
For more difcult welds, however, the robot would
defer to its human partner to perform better.
16
By specializing tasks, process improvements are just
the beginning of how enterprises will improve their
workforce. Machine learning means managers can
now entrust robots with whole work?ows, not just
simple tasks. Amazon’s Kiva robots, working alongside
warehouse employees, not only improve operational
efciency as they retrieve items, but also enable
dynamic warehouse operations. These robots can
reduce the average time it takes to grab an item from
a shelf to 15 minutes, down from an hour and a half,
and their dynamic and adaptive algorithms suggest
inventory sorting.
17
For example, they know that
certain seldom-ordered products are better stored in
a more remote area.
1 out of 3
Are considering using
robotics to automate
business and industrial
processes.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
#t echvi s i on2015
96 TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED
These advances in technology mean that humans
now have the opportunity to multiply their efciency.
A blended human and machine workforce is giving
companies the ability to automate tasks, improve
processes, and contribute to a positive feedback
loop—driving increased intelligence, performance,
and productivity across the enterprise.
Building your new workforce
From newer and more natural user interfaces to
smarter physical devices and machines, improvements
in intelligent technology are enabling teams of
humans and machines to collaborate more easily and
efectively than ever before—and empowering them
to do more together than they ever could alone.
Just what will it take to realize the full potential of
humans and machines working together? Companies
must prioritize the training of the blended workforce,
helping their human talent grow the skills needed to
complement machine capabilities.
Furthermore, companies must start making
technology more approachable and usable to a
broader set of employees. Gartner predicts that
“by 2018, the total cost of ownership for business
operations will be 30 percent lower than today
because of the wider use of smart machines and
industrialized services across the enterprise.”
18
Training
Advances in technology are empowering people
to learn in new ways—and technology is getting
smarter, too, thanks to human feedback. Together,
these improvements result in greater employee
engagement.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are gaining
traction as a legitimate way to receive quality
training. Ninety percent of our survey respondents
report they expect to use MOOCs within the next
three years as a way to better train their workforce.
90
%
Expect to use MOOCs
within the next three years
as a way to better train
their workforce.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED 97
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Coursera’s Signature Track program, for instance,
is enabling companies such as Yahoo to develop
their own signature training programs, which can
be completed remotely and at a person’s own pace.
Researchers at Stanford University are using MOOCs
to realize big gains in efciency. By incorporating
machine learning techniques into their Machine
Learning MOOCs, they are able to provide near-
real-time feedback to approximately 25 percent of
students in a 100,000-student course. To do this, the
university only needs about half of the efort that
would normally go into providing feedback for code
submissions provided by a traditional group of
400 students.
19
But in a workforce of humans and machines, it’s
not just people that need training to keep their
skills up to date. Enterprises also have to invest in
their machines to ensure that employee–technology
collaboration is optimized.
In experiments at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), researchers have shown that
an industrial robot can be trained by essentially
observing and adapting to the habits of an individual
worker. In this speci?c manufacturing experiment,
humans inserted objects into prepared drill holes in
whatever sequence they preferred. Robots then made
the workers more efcient by observing and then
predicting their sequence of object placement, and
then ?lling holes with glue just before the workers
inserted objects into the holes.
20
Errors, such as glue
drying before an object was inserted, were reduced
without having to change or adapt the humans’
work styles.
Advances in robotics technology mean that training
some machines, such as Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, is
as simple as moving their robotic limbs so that they
can learn what to do.
21
Over time, that may lead to
real-time collaborative learning by both the human
and the machine as they learn to optimize the
completion of predictable tasks.
#t echvi s i on2015
98 TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED
Democratization of skills
Another way to improve interactions between people
and machines is to “democratize” technology—
?nd ways to categorize and shift skill sets so
that employees can approach tasks that were
previously reserved for specialists. For example,
new developments in higher-level programming
languages, such as Apple’s Swift and Google’s Go,
are making it easier for business users to create their
own applications. While software development used
to require speci?c coding skills, syntax knowledge,
and architecture topologies, today’s more accessible
programming languages require far fewer specialized
development skills—putting them within reach of
non-IT professionals.
Similarly, drag-and-drop visual interfaces make it
easier for tasks such as data prep to be simpli?ed by
software. Trifacta is one such company that supports
agile data exploration, essentially bringing visual
analysis to everyone. Now, non-IT employees can
make insightful decisions with less intense data prep
and fewer analytical skills. By developing people
with greater learning agility, companies can shift the
emphasis away from speci?c expertise in favor of
industry knowledge.
Immersive wearable displays are also helping to
level up skills and improve employee engagement.
In Japan, Mitsubishi Electric is experimenting with
software from the augmented reality software
company Metaio on Epson’s Moverio smart glasses
to assist air conditioner technicians on their service
calls. The glasses let the technicians view three-
dimensional overlays on the physical objects they’re
repairing so that they can see how to remove or
replace parts.
22
TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED 99
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Volkswagen has also created a display system for
its XL1 hybrid, which makes it easier for mechanics
to quickly repair the vehicle’s complex power train
design. Using a tablet that shows an on-screen
digital overlay, mechanics can review the context-
dependent steps that they must take.
23
This reduces
repair times, supports rapid and complex product
design changes, and enables dynamic learning—
technicians no longer have to pause to refer to
a service manual or call the home ofce for
additional instruction.
Better workforce,
better business
This reimagined workforce—one that will enable more
work to be done better—will raise many new issues
as well. Which jobs should be assigned to humans
and which to humans working with machines?
What governance systems are in place to help us
decide? How do we deliberately and strategically
decentralize decision-making so that machines can
carry more of the load—sometimes literally? How
can the human workforce be trained for this new
blended work environment? How do we rethink the
skills for hiring human talent—should we emphasize
more or less specialized knowledge? Researchers are
continuing to probe into these kinds of questions.
For business and IT leaders, however, the biggest
question may be how to recognize and then respond
to the fact that business processes—indeed, the entire
value chain of business operations—are starting to shift
from a labor-driven and technology-enabled paradigm
to a digital-driven and human-enabled model.
24
#t echvi s i on2015
100 TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED
Leading companies are already beginning to voice
these kinds of questions. They are starting to think
about the combinations of intelligent technology
and training that can enable and optimize human-
machine eforts, accomplishing more than either
could on their own. They are looking anew at core
business activities to identify those tasks that can
be better suited to involving machines. And they are
beginning to give thought to what type of people
they should be hiring in the future.
Human and machine, each on its own, won’t be
enough to drive business in the decades to come.
Tomorrow’s leading enterprises will be those that
reimagine their workforce and efectively blend
humans and technology as partners. Get ready for
your new digital workforce.
TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED 101
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Take 100 days to learn about the variety of options
that contribute to the reimagined workforce. Decide
how you can harness them moving forward.
• Appoint a cross-functional team to uncover
opportunities for integrating technology to
augment your workforce’s operational efciency
and workplace safety—include members from the
human resources, business, and technology areas.
• Identify what competitors and companies in other
industries are doing in blended workforces. Based
on the benchmark results, prioritize the range of
opportunities, timelines, and risk-return criteria.
• Establish criteria to identify use cases for
investment in further human-machine
collaboration. Based on your company’s criteria,
?nd the segment with the most practitioners in
your company and identify which tasks rely more
on precision, scale, and consistency versus creativity
and contextual decision-making.
• Take a close look at positions that remain open.
Pilot ?lling these positions with new methods of
people and machine interaction.
• Ensure an understanding of where your workforce
needs augmentation technologies, and perform a
gap analysis on the skills that will be required of
future employees.
• Evaluate if technology can be used to address
some of the worker safety issues in remote and
challenging environments.
• Test scenarios where wearable computing
technologies improve the seamless integration of
workers and business processes.
• Pilot the use of new training technology to deliver
more options for a distributed workforce—consider
massive open online course (MOOC) certi?cation
programs, virtualized training, and job swapping.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
#t echvi s i on2015
102 TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED
By this time next year, your business should have an
understanding of the types of workplace tasks that
employees can let machines complete. Begin building
a blended workforce in stages.
• Pilot prioritized solutions by dividing and
distributing tasks that play to your workforce’s
strengths: machines for precision, scale, and
consistency and humans for creativity, contextual
decisions, and complex communication.
• Determine industry-relevant opportunities for
leveraging technology to help your human
workforce focus on tasks that are more complex.
• Create employee-training programs that are
sensitive to the new skills required for your
blended workforce.
• Integrate technology where specially trained
workers were previously required. Use the
augmentation technologies to make those jobs
available to less skilled workers.
• Evaluate and apply technologies to address some of
the worker safety issues in remote and challenging
environments.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED 103
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Stretching the Boundaries
of the Digital Business
CONCLUSION
Two years ago, the Accenture Technology Vision
signaled that “Every business was becoming a digital
business.” We forecasted worldwide transformation
in the role of technology and in the business models
required for success, detailing what it would take
for every business to re-imagine itself in this new
digital era.
Last year, we pushed that thinking further. Our report
declared that “Big is the Next Big Thing”—meaning
that large and often long-established companies
were starting to use technology as a driving force
for how they grow. We predicted that these new
“digerati,” with their deep resources, huge scale, and
process discipline, were about to rewrite much of the
digital playbook.
One year on, Global 2000 companies have been
transforming along this very path. There is John Deere,
founded in 1837, and today a true digital trailblazer.
There is consumer electronics titan Samsung, now
moving into very diferent digital realms. The list of
digital giants gets longer by the day.
But what’s signi?cant is that non-IT companies are
placing themselves in the driver’s seat. They are not
waiting for the next wave of technology to wash
over them. There is no technology standard that must
crystallize before they can act. They are not watching
to see what Google or Facebook or Box or Pinterest is
doing—they are making their big moves proactively.
#t echvi s i on2015
104 CONCLUSI ON
And what’s new about those moves is that they
are not directed internally—toward improvements
in their current operations and business processes.
Instead, these enterprises are stretching their
boundaries to leverage a broader ecosystem of digital
businesses as they shape the next generation of their
products, services, and business models.
As such, the digital movers are thinking big thoughts,
asking big questions: how do we sell insurance in an
age of driverless cars? Are we selling services, such
as an electrical supply, or outcomes, such as warmth
and comfort? Are we making and selling televisions
or creating hubs for smart homes? How can we help
bring about tomorrow’s smart mega-cities? What can
we do to solve the world’s looming food shortages?
Leading companies are no longer thinking only
about using technology to transform themselves
into a digital business. They are thinking about how
to combine their industry expertise with the power
of digital technology to reshape their markets and
de?ne their new role in a “We Economy.”
Make no mistake, this “We Economy” will require a
much diferent approach to building applications—
one that is liquid, intelligent, and connected. Future
applications need to be more nimble. Companies
that begin their reinvention now will bene?t from
applications that can adapt to the pace of business,
manage rising complexity and open doors to more
interconnected business environments. This new
approach is described in the Accenture Future of
Applications Point of View.
The questions for leaders of traditional businesses
are now these: how will your organization exercise
its digital advantage? What will your company do
to grow and expand to take on greater challenges?
And ultimately—what will our future be, together as
enterprises in the “We Economy?”
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
CONCLUSI ON 105
About the Technology Vision
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
#t echvi s i on2015
106 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Every year, the Technology Vision team collaborates
with Accenture Research to pinpoint the emerging
IT developments that will have the greatest impact
on companies, government agencies, and other
organizations in the next three to ?ve years.
The research process this year began with gathering
inputs from the Technology Vision External Advisory
Board, a group comprising of more than two dozen
executives and entrepreneurs from the public and
private sectors, academia, venture capital, and
startup companies. In addition, the Technology
Vision team conducted nearly 100 interviews
with technology luminaries, industry experts, and
Accenture business leaders.
The team also tapped into the vast pool of
knowledge and innovative ideas from professionals
across Accenture, using Accenture’s collaboration
technologies and a crowdsourcing approach to
launch and run an online contest to uncover the
most interesting emerging technology themes. Over
1,700 participants actively engaged in the contest,
contributing valuable ideas and voting on others’
inputs.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 107
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
In parallel, Accenture Research conducted a global
survey of 2,000 business and IT executives across nine
countries and 10 industries to capture insights into
the adoption of emerging technologies. The survey
identi?ed key issues and priorities for technology
adoption and investment. Respondents include
mostly C-level executives and directors. Functional
and line of business leads were also included.
Respondent company revenues were $500 million and
over with the majority of companies over $6 billion.
As a shortlist of themes emerged from the research
process, the Technology Vision team hosted a series
of deep-dive sessions with Accenture leadership
and external subject-matter experts, validating and
further re?ning the themes. Once a set of trends
emerged that appeared to be complete, the External
Advisory Board was reconvened to validate the
selection of trends and add insight from their own
spheres of in?uence.
The screens used during these processes weighed the
themes for their relevance to “real world” business
challenges. Speci?cally, the Technology Vision team
sought ideas that transcend the well-known drivers
of technological change, concentrating instead on
the themes that will soon start to appear on the
C-level agendas of most enterprises. Each theme met
the following criteria:
• Actionable today
• Highly relevant to an organization’s transformation
within three years
• Having signi?cant impact beyond any one
industry “silo”
• Disruptive beyond a straightforward “one for one”
replacement for an existing solution
• Transcending any one vendor or discrete “product”
technology
This process resulted in the ?ve overarching themes
presented in this year’s report.
#t echvi s i on2015
108 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Revenue
(USD)
6-9.9
billion
1-5.9
billion
+50
billion
500-999
million
20-49.9
billion
10-19.9
billion
Auto
Banking
Communications
Healthcare
Industrial
Equipment
Insurance
Life Sciences
Public Service
Retail
Utilities
Title
Director, IT 24%
15%
13%
13%
9%
9%
7%
6%
4%
Function Head
CIO or Chief Mobility Ofcer
CTO or Director of Technology
CMO
Line of Business Head
COO
CFO
CSO
Headquarters
Locations 10%
190 184 167 171 199
10% 10% 10% 10%
Headquarters
Locations 10%
143 185 298 451
10% 15% 15%
Australia Brazil China France
India South Africa United Kingdom United States
Germany
Industry
220
243
230
101
221 221
208
162
234
160
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015 SURVEY DEMOGRAPHICS
As a new input into this year’s
Technology Vision, we conducted a
global survey of 2,000 business and
IT executives across nine countries in
order to understand their perspectives
on key technology challenges they face,
and identify their priority investments
over the next few years. This survey
was ?elded from December 2014
through January 2015.
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 109
END NOTES
Trend 1: The Internet of Me
1
“Smart Light Bulb Saves Energy as It Learns,”
Engineering.com, September 14, 2014.http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/
ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/8489/Smart-
Light-Bulb-Saves-Energy-as-It-Learns.aspx.
“10 Things You Did Not Know You Can Do With
Philips Hue and IFTTT,” Smart Bulb Reviews,
February 2, 2014.http://smartbulbreviews.com/10-
things-you-did-not-know-you-can-do-with-
philips-hue-and-ifttt/.
2
“What is an Adaptive Transmission?” Cars.com,
September 19, 2013.http://ask.cars.com/2013/09/
what-is-an-adaptive-transmission.html.
3
“Meet Levi’s Stadium, the Most High-Tech Sports
Venue Yet,” Time, August 18, 2014.http://time.com/3136272/levis-stadium-
tech/#3136272/levis-stadium-tech/.
4
“Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2015 and
Beyond: Digital Business is Driving ‘Big Change,”
Gartner, October 4, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/document/2864817?ref=s
hareSummary.
5
“The Internet of Things: The Future of Consumer
Adoption,” Acquity Group, 2014.http://www.acquitygroup.com/docs/default-source/
Whitepapers/acquitygroup-2014iotstudyfca32e344
0236f7b9704f000083d49c.pdf?sfvrsn=2.
6
“The Nest Developer Program is Here,” Nest,
June 23, 2014.https://nest.com/blog/2014/06/23/
the-nest-developer-program-is-here/.
7
“Whirlpool Corporation Announces Product
Integration with Nest,” Whirlpool press release,
June 24, 2014.http://investors.whirlpoolcorp.
com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=856250. (Note:
Energy-saving feature is ofered via Nest’s Rush
Hour Rewards program)
8
“Ralph Lauren Introduces iPhone-connected ‘Polo
Tech’ Fitness Tracking Shirt,” 9 to 5 Mac Apple
Intelligence, August 26, 2014.http://9to5mac.
com/2014/08/26/ralph-lauren-introduces-iphone-
connected-polo-tech-?tness-tracking-shirt/.
9
“Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2015 and
Beyond: Digital Business is Driving ‘Big Change,”
Gartner, October 4, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/document/2864817?ref=s
hareSummary.
10
“Smartphone Users Check Facebook 14 Times a
Day,” Mashable, March 27, 2013.http://mashable.com/2013/03/27/facebook-usage-
survey/.
11
“Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2014 Results,”
Facebook, October 28, 2014.http://investor.fb.com/
releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=878726.
12
“The Internet of Things: The Future of Consumer
Adoption,” Acquity Group, 2014.http://www.acquitygroup.com/docs/default-source/
Whitepapers/acquitygroup-2014iotstudyfca32e344
0236f7b9704f000083d49c.pdf?sfvrsn=2.
#t echvi s i on2015
110 NOTES
13
“The Future of the Connected Car,” AT&T,
January 6, 2014.http://about.att.com/newsroom/
connected_car.html.
14
“Coca-Cola Amatil Boosts Sales With Interactive
Vending Machines,” FoodBev.com, May 6, 2014.http://www.foodbev.com/news/coca-cola-amatil-
boosts-sales-with-inter#.VCm4_hYfBSk.
15
“PayGo to Support Georgia Power Prepay
Initiative,” PayGo press release, January 21, 2014.http://home.paygoelectric.com/paygo-to-support-
georgia-power-prepay-initiative/.
16
“Customer Desires vs. Retailer Capabilities:
Minding the Omni-Channel Commerce Gap,”
Forrester Consulting report commissioned by
Accenture and hybris software, January 20, 2014.http://www.accenture.com/
SiteCollectionDocuments/Accenture-Customer-
Desires-VS-Retailer-Capabilities.pdf.
17
PhysIQ website:http://www.physiq.com.
18
“Macy’s, Inc. Outlines New Developments in
Omnichannel Strategy and Technology,” Macy’s
press release, September 15, 2014.http://www.businesswire.com/news/
home/20140915005587/en/Macy’s-Outlines-
Developments-Omnichannel-Strategy-
Technology#.VBc5R0sR4jJ.
19
“Connected Car App Automatic Gets Even
Smarter With IFTTT Integration,” TechCrunch,
February 26, 2014.http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/connected-
car-app-automatic-gets-even-smarter-with-ifttt-
integration/.
20
IFTTT website:https://ifttt.com/recipes.
21
“Pandora Wants to DJ the ‘Internet of Things’
(Q&A),” CNET, July 5, 2014.http://www.cnet.com/news/pandora-wants-to-dj-
the-internet-of-things-q-a/.
22
“Following Rumors That the FuelBand is Dead,
Nike CEO Admits the Company Will Focus on
Software,” Business Insider, April 25, 2014.http://www.businessinsider.com/nike-ceo-admits-
that-the-company-will-focus-on-software-2014-4.
23
“The Four Keys to Digital Trust,” Accenture,
September 9, 2014.http://www.accenture.com/
SiteCollectionDocuments/communications/
accenture-four-keys-digital-trust.pdf.
24
“Anything Apple Can Do...Google’s Android L
Software Will Be Encrypted by Default—Just Like
iOS 8,” Daily MailOnline UK, September 19, 2014.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/
article-2762150/Anything-Apple-Google-s-Android-
L-software-encrypted-default-just-like-iOS-8.html.
25
“Why OKCupid’s ‘Experiments’ Were Worse Than
Facebook’s,” Hufngton Post, August 6, 2014.http://www.hufngtonpost.com/joseph-farrell/
why-okcupids-experiments-_b_5655217.html.
26
“Lookout Open Sourced Its “Private Parts,” You
Should, Too,” Lookout, March 12, 2014.https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2014/03/12/open-
source-privacy-policy/.
NOTES 111
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Trend 2: The Outcome Economy
1
“Comedy Club Charges per Laugh with Facial
Recognition,” BBC News, October 9, 2014.http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29551380.
2
ExpressPark Demand Based Pricing results are based
on “LA Express Park: Demand-Based Pricing—How is it
Working?” from the ITSA Smart Parking Symposium,
March 18, 2013.http://vimeo.com/64186728.
3
“The M2M Adoption Barometer 2014,” Vodafone,
July 2, 2014.https://m2m.vodafone.com/cs/m2m/
insight_news/2014-07-02-the-m2m-adoption-
barometer-2014.
4
Ibid.
5
“The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis,” Cisco,
June 10, 2014.http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/
solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-
networking-index-vni/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_
WP.html.
6
Anthony W. Ulwick, “Turn Customer Input into
Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002.
7
Climate Corporation website:http://www.climate.com/.
8
“The Mission of Tesla,” Tesla blog by Elon Musk,
November 18, 2013.http://www.teslamotors.com/
blog/mission-tesla.
9
Interview with Yashar Behzad, Director of Product
Development and Data Science at Proteus Digital
Health, July 30, 2014.
10
“Your Nest Protect Just Got a Whole Lot
Smarter,” Gizmoto, September 4, 2014.http://gizmodo.com/your-nest-protect-just-got-a-
whole-lot-smarter-1630455315.
11
“MEMS Market Tracker—Consumer and Mobile—
H2 2013,” IHS, March 4, 2014.https://technology.ihs.com/426078/.
12
“Internet Trends 2014,” KPCB, May 28, 2014.http://kpcb.com/internet-trends.
13
Broadcom website:http://www.broadcom.com/
products/wiced/sense/.
14
“Specs That See Right Through You,” New Scientist,
July 5, 2011.http://www.newscientist.com/article/
mg21128191.600-specs-that-see-right-through-
you.html.
15
Interview with Ben Waber, Co-Founder, President
and CEO of Sociometric Solutions, August 18, 2014.
16
Gigaom conference in SF, Tuesday, October 21st,
presentation by Phil Bosua, CEO of LIFX.
17
Accenture analysis.
18
“How Much Venture Capital are Kickstarter and
Indiegogo Hardware Projects Raising?” CB Insights,
August 11, 2014.http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/
crowdfunded-venture-capital-hardware/.
19
Wink website:http://www.winkapp.com/faq.
“Wink, Home Depot Aim to ‘Take Confusion Out’
of Home Automation,” CEPro, July 1, 2014.http://www.cepro.com/article/wink_home_
depot_aim_to_take_confusion_out_of_home_
automation_starting_today/.
20
“Musk Solar Strategy Used as Model for Record
Investments,” Bloomberg, September 15, 2014.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-15/
musk-solar-strategy-used-as-model-for-record-
investments.html.
21
“Facebook: Open Compute Has Saved Us $1.2
Billion,” Data Center Knowledge, January 28, 2014.http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/
archives/2014/01/28/facebook-open-compute-
saved-us-1-2-billion/.
#t echvi s i on2015
112 NOTES
Trend 3: The Platform (R)evolution
1
“John Deere Launches MyJohnDeere Web Portal
as Customer Resource,” John Deere press release,
June 29, 2012.http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/
en_US/corporate/our_company/news_and_media/
press_releases/2012/agriculture/2012jun29_
myjohndeere.page.
2
“The Ups and Downs of Dynamic Pricing,”
Innovation@Work blog, October 31, 2014.http://executive.mit.edu/blog/the-ups-and-downs-
of-dynamic-pricing#.VG4yA_nF-bU.
3
“Constellation’s 2014 Outlook on Dominating
Digital Business Disruption,” Constellation
Research, February 10, 2014.https://www.constellationr.com/content/research-
summary-sneak-peeks-constellations-futurist-
framework-and-2014-outlook-digital.
4
“Directions 2014 Tokyo: Key Battles and
Strategies for Dominance on the 3rd Platform,”
IDC, June 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=J14990272.
5
“The Ups and Downs of Dynamic Pricing,”
Innovation@Work blog, October 31, 2014.http://executive.mit.edu/blog/the-ups-and-downs-
of-dynamic-pricing#.VG4yA_nF-bU.
6
“Gartner Forecasts IT Spending Growth and
Trends,” Gartner, November 10, 2014.http://gartnernews.com/gartner-forecasts-it-
spending-growth-and-trends/.
7
“Constellation’s 2014 Outlook on Dominating
Digital Business Disruption,” Constellation
Research, February 10, 2014.https://www.constellationr.com/content/research-
summary-sneak-peeks-constellations-futurist-
framework-and-2014-outlook-digital.
8
“IDC Predictions 2015: Accelerating Innovation—
and Growth—on the 3rd Platform,” IDC,
December 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=252700.
9
“How Kaiser Bet $4 Billion on Electronic Health
Records—and Won,” InfoWorld, May 2, 2013.http://www.infoworld.com/article/2614353/ehr/
how-kaiser-bet--4-billion-on-electronic-health-
records----and-won.html.
10
Worldometers website:http://www.worldometers.
info/world-population/china-population/.
11
“Bright Ideas for Cities of Light,” China Daily,
October 29, 2012.http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/
business/2012-10/29/content_15854498.htm.
12
“Schneider Electric Boosts Partner Programs for
EcoStruxure,” Data Center Knowledge, June 7, 2013.
13
“Zynga Makes Up 12% of Facebook’s 2011
Revenue,” Forbes, February 1, 2012.
14
“Top Grossing iOS Mobile Gaming Apps as of
October 2014, Ranked by Daily Revenue (in U.S.
Dollars),” Statista, October 2014.http://www.statista.com/statistics/263988/top-
grossing-mobile-ios-gaming-apps-ranked-by-
daily-revenue/.
15
Apple website:https://developer.apple.com/
programs/ios/distribute.html.
16
Salesforce.com website:http://www.salesforce.
com/au/platform/what/.
17
Amazon.com website:http://aws.amazon.com/
about-aws/global-infrastructure/.
18
Ariba website:http://www.ariba.com/solutions/
the-ariba-network.
19
“What is Alibaba?” WSJ.com, 2014.http://projects.wsj.com/alibaba/.
20
http://apigee.com/about/press-releases.
NOTES 113
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
21
“General Motors Selects AT&T’s 4G LTE Network
to Deliver Enhanced Services to Millions of
Vehicles,” AT&T press release, February 25, 2013.http://www.brslabs.com/industries/energy/.
22
GE website:https://www.gesoftware.com/about.
23
“Minds + Machines Roundup: One Platform,
40 Predictivity Solutions, and Predix for All,” GE
Software, October 9, 2014.
https:\www.gesoftware.com\blog\minds-machines-
roundup-one-platform-40-predictivity-solutions-
and-predix-all.
Trend 4: Intelligent Enterprise
1
“Fostering a Data-Driven Culture,” Economist
Intelligent Unit and Tableau, 2013.http://www.tableausoftware.com/economist-
fostering-data-driven-culture.
2
“Analytics, Data-Driven Culture Bring Business
Success: Survey,” eWeek.com, September 27, 2012.http://www.eweek.com/it-management/analytics-
data-driven-culture-bring-business-success-
survey/?mchk=1.
3
“Data Driven Leaders Can Create a Big Data
Payof.” Business News Daily, September 30, 2014.http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7218-data-
driven-leadership.html.
4
“The CMO–CIO Disconnect Bridging the Gap to
Seize the Digital Opportunity,” Accenture, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/
PDF/Accenture-2040-CMO-CIO.pdf.
5
“EMC Digital Universe Study,” with data and
analysis by IDC, April 2014.http://www.emc.com/
leadership/digital-universe/index.htm.
6
“Average Cost of Hard Drive Storage,” Statistic
Brain, November 11, 2014.http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-cost-of-
hard-drive-storage/.
7
“Public Cloud Services Spending Is Being Driven
by Enterprise Applications Solutions, According to
IDC,” IDC press release, July 7, 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=prUS24977214.
8
“The CMO–CIO Disconnect. Bridging the Gap to
Seize the Digital Opportunity”, Accenture, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/
PDF/Accenture-2040-CMO-CIO.pdf.
9
“Data Driven Leaders Can Create a Big Data
Payof,” Business News Daily, September 30, 2014.http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7218-data-
driven-leadership.html.
10
“EMC Digital Universe Study,” with data and
analysis by IDC, April 2014.http://www.emc.com/
leadership/digital-universe/index.htm.
11
“Why More Data and Simple Algorithms Beat
Complex Analytics,” DataInformed, August 7, 2013.http://data-informed.com/why-more-data-and-
simple-algorithms-beat-complex-analytics-models/.
#t echvi s i on2015
114 NOTES
12
“Google Translate—Find Out How Our
Translations Are Created,” Google, 2014.http://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/.
“Big Data is the New Arti?cial Intelligence,”
Betanews.com, April 16, 2014.http://betanews.com/2014/04/16/big-data-is-the-
new-arti?cial-intelligence/.
“Google Translate Now Serves 200 Million People
Daily,” CNET, May 18, 2013.http://www.cnet.com/
news/google-translate-now-serves-200-million-
people-daily/.
13
“Shazam Predicts 2013 Chart Toppers,” Billboard,
November 30, 2012.http://www.billboard.com/
biz/articles/news/1082833/shazam-predicts-2013-
chart-toppers.
“Can Shazam Predict the Next Big Hit? Industry
Insiders Look to Song Identi?cation App as New
Measure of Success” Rollingstone.com, February 20,
2014.http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/
can-shazam-predict-the-next-big-hit-20140220.
14
“Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt,”
InfoWorld, November 21, 2013.http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609482/data-
center/review--puppet-vs--chef-vs--ansible-vs--
salt.html.
15
“MorphLabs uses Puppet for Con?guration
Management Automation and to Quickly Deliver
Custom Cloud Services,” Puppet Labs, July 2010.http://puppetlabs.com/sites/default/?les/wp-content/
uploads/2010/07/CaseStudy_MorphLabs_0.pdf.
16
“Pega Customers: Heathrow,” Pega website.http://www.pega.com/customers/heathrow.
17
“Why Do DevOps?”, New Relic website.http://newrelic.com/devops/bene?ts-of-devops.
18
“Machine Learning and Recommender Systems
@ Net?ix Scale—Qcon International Software
Development Conference 2013”, Xavier Amatriain,
Research/Engineering Manager at Net?ix,
November 2013.http://www.slideshare.net/xamat/
qcon-sf-2013-machine-learning-recommender-
systems-net?ix-scale.
19
“Big Data at Net?ix Drives Business Decisions,”
InfoQ, December 12, 2013.http://www.infoq.com/
news/2013/12/net?ix-bigdata-decisions.
20
“The Science Behind the Net?ix Algorithms That
Decide What You’ll Watch Next,” Wired, August 7,
2013.http://www.wired.com/2013/08/qq_net?ix-
algorithm/.
21
“Case Study: Midstream Gas Pipeline,” BRS Labs,
2014.http://www.brslabs.com/?les/pdf/Case_
Study_SCADA.pdf.
22
6Sense website:http://6sense.com/.
23
“IBM Unveils Plans for Watson Supercomputer,”
CNN Money, January 9, 2014.http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/09/technology/
enterprise/ibm-watson/.
24
“Transforming Tomorrow. Delivering Today. A
Selection of Stories from Organizations Adopting
IPsoft’s Innovative Autonomic Solutions to Deliver
Guaranteed Business Outcomes”, IPsoft, June 2014.http://www.ipsoft.com/wp-content/
uploads/2014/06/Case_Study_Selection1.pdf.
25
City of Boston Street Bump Mobile App:http://www.cityofboston.gov/doit/apps/streetbump.asp.
“Confronting the Data Dilemma,” Elizabeth Good
Christopherson, Rita Allen Foundation, July 25, 2013.http://www.ritaallenfoundation.org/blogs/
confronting-data-dilemma.php.
NOTES 115
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Trend 5: Workforce Reimagined
1
“Natural Language Processing (NLP) Market worth
$9,858.4 Million by 2018,” Markets and Markets,
October 2013.http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/
natural-language-processing-nlp.asp.
2
“Baidu Builds Largest Computer Brain for Online
Queries,” Bloomberg, September 4, 2014.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-04/
baidu-builds-largest-computer-brain-for-online-
queries.html.
3
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/
newsroom/id/2866617.
4
Ibid.
5
“Mercedes-Benz’s Autonomous Driving
Features Dominate the Industry—and Will for
Years,” Automotive News, August 4, 2014.http://www.autonews.com/article/20140804/
OEM06/308049979/mercedes-benzs-autonomous-
driving-features-dominate-the-industry.
6
“Using Cameras and Fancy Algorithms to Track
Spinning Space Junk,’ Wired, September 11, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/09/algorithm-
spinning-space-junk/.
7
“How an LA Times Reporter Got an Algorithm to
Write Articles for Him,” Business Insider, March 17,
2014.http://www.businessinsider.com/quakebot-
robot-la-times-2014-3.
8
“Rise of Robot Reporters: When Software Writes
the News,” New Scientist, March 21, 2014.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25273-rise-
of-robot-reporters-when-software-writes-the-
news.html#.VHuaEzHF_1Y.
9
“Natural Language Processing (NLP) Market
worth $9,858.4 Million by 2018,” Natural Language
Processing (NLP) Market [IVR, OCR, Pattern
Recognition, Auto Coding, Text Analytics, Speech
Analytics, Machine Translation, Information
Extraction, Question Answer, Report Generation]—
Worldwide Market Forecast & Analysis (2013–2018),”
MarketsandMarkets, October 2013.http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/
natural-language-processing-nlp.asp.
10
“More AI for developers as Expect Labs releases
the MindMeld API,” Gigaom, February 19, 2014.https://gigaom.com/2014/02/19/more-ai-for-
developers-as-expect-labs-releases-the-mindmeld-api/.
11
“Accenture Life Safety Solution Named New
Product of the Year,” Accenture press release,
October 23, 2012.http://newsroom.accenture.com/
news/accenture-life-safety-solution-named-new-
product-of-the-year.htm.
12
“New Technology from Seeing Machines Ofered
in Caterpillar Mining Trucks to Combat Driver
Fatigue,” M2M Evolution, May 29, 2013.http://www.m2mevolution.com/topics/m2mevolution/
articles/339753-new-technology-from-seeing-
machines-ofered-caterpillar-mining.htm.
13
“Accenture and Philips Collaborate on Google
Glass Proof-of-Concept in the Medical Equipment
Technology Industry,” Accenture, October 3, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/service-
google-glass-medical-equipment-technology-
industry.aspx.
14
“Google Glass Helped to Enhance the Way that a
Surgeon Can Perform Various Procedures,” Mobile
Commerce Press, February 21, 2014.http://www.mobilecommercepress.com/
augmented-reality-wearable-technology-assists-
cancer-surgery/8510991/.
15
“Navy’s Exoskeleton Could Make Workers 20
Times More Productive,” Wired, September 10, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/09/navys-exoskeleton-
could-make-workers-20-times-more-productive/.
#t echvi s i on2015
116 NOTES
16
“The Future of Computer Intelligence Is
Everything but Arti?cial,” Wired, June 11, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-future-of-
computer-intelligence-is-everything-but-arti?cial/.
17
“Meet Amazon’s Busiest Employee—the Kiva
Robot,” CNET, November 30, 2014.http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-amazons-busiest-
employee-the-kiva-robot/.
18
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner press release, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2866617.
19
Jonathan Huang, “Data Driven Student Feedback
for Programming Intensive MOOCs,” Stanford
Computer Forum, April 16, 2014.https://forum.stanford.edu/events/2014/2014jonat
hanhuanginfo.php.
20
“Robotic Assistants May Adapt to Humans
in the Factory,” MIT News, June 12, 2012.http://newsofce.mit.edu/2012/robot-
manufacturing-0612.
21
“Increasingly, Robots of All Sizes Are Human
Workmates,” MIT Technology Review, April 23, 2014.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/526691/
increasingly-robots-of-all-sizes-are-human-
workmates/.
22
“Augmented Reality gets to Work,” MIT
Technology Review, February 24, 2014.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524626/
augmented-reality-gets-to-work/.
23
“Volkswagen XL1 Gets an Augmented Reality
Service App,” Mashable, October 5, 2013.http://mashable.com/2013/10/05/volkswagen-
augmented-reality/.
24
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner press release, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2866617.
NOTES 117
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Contact us
Paul Daugherty
Chief Technology Ofcer
[email protected]
Prith Banerjee
Managing Director, Accenture Technology R&D
[email protected]
Michael J. Biltz
Managing Director, Accenture Technology Vision
[email protected]
accenture.com/technologyvision
FOR MORE INFORMATION
#t echvi s i on2015
118 CONTACTS
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
CONTACTS 119
ABOUT US
About the Accenture Technology Labs
The Technology Vision is published each year by
the Accenture Technology Labs, the research and
development (R&D) organization within Accenture.
For more than 20 years, the Technology Labs have
helped Accenture and its clients convert technology
innovation into business results. Our R&D team
explores new and emerging technologies to create
a vision of how technology will shape the future
and shape the next wave of cutting edge
business solutions.
The Accenture Technology Labs ofers seminars on
the Technology Vision, which provide a forum to
discuss the trends in greater depth and explore the
implications for your organization’s business.
To learn more about the Accenture Technology Labs,
or our seminars, contact a member of the Technology
Vision team or visit www.accenture.com/technologylabs.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting,
technology services and outsourcing company, with
approximately 319,000 people serving clients in
more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled
experience, comprehensive capabilities across all
industries and business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful companies,
Accenture collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses and governments.
The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion
for the ?scal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2015 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
14-6367U/9-8959
doc_241368408.pdf
The digital era not only makes big bets possible but increasingly necessary.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Digital Business Era:
Stretch Your Boundaries
Foreword 3
Introduction 4
Trends
01: The Internet of Me 18
02: Outcome Economy 34
03: Platform (R)evolution 50
04: The Intelligent Enterprise 70
05: Workforce Reimagined 88
Conclusion 104
Research Methodology 106
End Notes 110
Contacts 118
CONTENTS
#t echvi s i on2015
2 CONTENTS
We are pleased to present the Accenture Technology
Vision 2015, our annual view of the technology
trends that will have a profound impact on
enterprises for the next three to ?ve years.
This year, we see an unprecedented leap forward by
organizations on the journey to becoming digital
businesses. The change is not simply progress. It’s
culminating in a diferent way of doing business
entirely. “Digital Business Era: Stretch Your Boundaries,”
looks at how digital businesses are moving beyond
their traditional models. It focuses on how these
businesses, in aggregate, are creating a hyper-
connected world where companies, consumers and
even everyday objects have instant capabilities to act
and interact with each other digitally across the globe.
We call this world the “We Economy,” and it ofers
savvy companies new strategies to compete and win
in a digital world. It also provides rich opportunities
for businesses to collaborate with other players in
the digital ecosystem to place “big bets”—on new
products, services and experiences—that would not
have been possible just one or two years ago, but
today can shape new markets at scale.
The critical message from our Accenture Technology
Vision 2015 is that businesses must think and act
diferently to succeed in this new environment.
A single idea, a single technology or a single
organization will no longer be the key to success.
High performers of the future will be those who
position themselves at the center of the emerging
digital ecosystems.
The Accenture Technology Vision 2015 is a must-read
for leaders of organizations across industries and
around the world. We hope it provides relevant ideas
to help you stretch boundaries in your journey to
become a digital business.
FOREWORD
Pierre Nanterme
Chairman & CEO
Paul Daugherty
Chief Technology Ofcer
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
FOREWORD 3
If your company is like most, over the
last few years you have seen your top
teams focused on leveraging social, mobile,
analytics, and cloud (SMAC) to transform
your enterprise into a digital business.
Today, the challenge has become:
what will business leaders do with their
digital advantage?
INTRODUCTION
#t echvi s i on2015
4 I NTRODUCTI ON
It’s not a trivial question. Becoming a digital
business is a massive transformation. Two years
ago, the Accenture Technology Vision forecasted
the pervasive need for every business to become a
digital business. We saw technology begin to take its
place as a primary driver of pro?tability and market
diferentiation in every industry.
Last year at Accenture, we began to see the industry
leaders embrace this transformation and begin to
reimagine their businesses for the digital era. The
2014 Accenture Technology Vision declared that “Big
Is the Next Big Thing.” We saw that the next logical
step for large and often long-established companies
was to start using technology not just as a way to
improve their own internal processes, but also as a
driving force for how they grow. We predicted that
these new “digerati,” with their deep resources, huge
scale, and process discipline, were about to rewrite
much of the digital playbook.
Today, we see pioneering enterprises beginning to
do just that—but they are doing far more than just
?exing their digital muscles. They are fundamentally
changing the way they look at themselves; leading
enterprises are quickly mastering the shift from “me”
to “we.” They are stretching their boundaries by
tapping into a broad array of other digital businesses,
digital customers, and even digital devices at the
edge of their networks. Leaders eager to drive change
are using this broader digital ecosystem to place bets
on a grand scale. These forward-thinking companies
are looking to shape entire markets and change the
way we work and live.
I NTRODUCTI ON 5
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Succeeding in the
“We Economy”
The digital era not only makes big bets possible but
increasingly necessary. The Internet of Things (IoT) is
becoming a force that is driving innovation and new
opportunities by bringing every object, consumer,
and activity into the digital realm. At the same time,
leading businesses are making similar changes within
their enterprises by digitizing every employee,
process, product, and service. This year, we conducted
our ?rst Technology Vision survey, polling more than
2,000 business and technology executives across nine
countries and 10 industries, in order to understand
key technology challenges as well as priority
investments. Our survey revealed that 62 percent are
investing in digital technologies, and 35 percent are
comprehensively investing in digital as part of their
overall business strategy.
Taken in aggregate, enterprises ?nd themselves
connected to a digital fabric that has the potential
to touch all aspects of their business, their customer
relationships, and the world around them. Already,
this fabric has provided enterprises with an ability
to connect and scale up in unprecedented ways.
Companies routinely deal with hundreds of business
processes, thousands of employees, and millions of
consumers. Many large companies are at a scale
where they touch billions of lives.
More and more, however, companies are beginning
to see that these connections are not just limited to
their employees and customers. They also have the
potential to tie themselves into a global network
of businesses, individuals, and things from every
industry around the world.
This grand network of connections and its
transformational power introduce a new era in the
digital age—the age of “digital ecosystems.”
Pioneering companies have already realized the
implications of tapping into a digital ecosystem. They
see that in such digitally driven, hyper-connected
times, they have the capacity for action beyond
transforming themselves into digital businesses.
62
%
Report they are investing
in digital technologies, and
35% are comprehensively
investing in digital as part
of their overall business
strategy.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
#t echvi s i on2015
6 I NTRODUCTI ON
In our survey, 81 percent believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into interconnected ecosystems.
Huge efciencies can and will be gained as businesses
continue to master digital technologies internally.
Visionary companies, however, are recognizing that
as every business becomes a digital business, together
they can efect change on a much bigger stage.
Working together, they can shape experiences—and
outcomes—in ways never before possible.
This is highlighted best in the rapidly growing
Industrial Internet of Things. Here, companies are
using these connections to ofer new services,
reshape experiences, and enter new markets by
creating digital ecosystems. Home Depot, for
example, is looking to shape the way people live
through an emerging connected home market. The
company is working with manufacturers to ensure
all of the connected home products it sells are
compatible with the Wink connected home system. In
doing so, Home Depot is creating its own connected
home ecosystem, with a wide range of services that
are easy to install.
Philips is taking a similar approach. No longer is
their healthcare practice just a producer of medical
equipment; Philips is teaming up with Salesforce
to build a platform that they believe will reshape
and optimize the way healthcare is delivered. The
envisioned platform will create an ecosystem of
developers building healthcare applications to enable
collaboration and work?ow between doctors and
patients across the entire spectrum of care, from
self-care and prevention to diagnosis and treatment
through recovery and wellness. By integrating data
from multiple sources worldwide, Philips sees an
enormous opportunity to improve patient health by
enhancing the decision-making capability of medical
professionals while increasing the active engagement
of patients in their own treatment. The ecosystem
Philips orchestrates to achieve these improved
outcomes is vast: electronic medical records,
diagnostic and treatment information obtained
through Philips’ imaging equipment, monitoring
equipment, and personal devices and technologies
like Apple’s HealthKit.
81
%
Believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will
dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into
interconnected ecosystems.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
I NTRODUCTI ON 7
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Fiat is looking toward connected cars as the
next growth opportunity within the automotive
industry. Partnering with leading edge companies
in navigation systems, media, social media and
entertainment sectors, Fiat is creating its own
Uconnect platform. It will be integrated with the
Fiat-Chrysler Group’s vehicles to provide drivers
with communication, entertainment, and navigation
features that can help drivers stay focused on driving.
Home Depot, Philips, Fiat, and many other companies
are making big bets on huge opportunities that have
the potential to bring about change on a global
scale. By tapping into digital ecosystems, these
companies have the ability to realize ambitions that
transcend any single business or any one industry.
These pioneering businesses see great potential
to make a diference—and to make a pro?t—by
operating as ecosystems, not just as individual
corporate entities. By mastering the shift from “me”
to “we,” these leading enterprises are shaping a new
economy—the “we economy.”
By tapping into the digital ecosystem, ordinary
businesses can tackle challenges that were previously
well beyond their scope. They can realize an opportunity
to help design and create smart mega-cities of the
future, radically rebuild centuries-old modes of
transportation, or raise the quality of healthcare by
addressing it holistically across many industries, from
hospitals to insurance to apparel. These are the types
of “epic” transformations that excite customers,
inspire employees, galvanize long-term suppliers—
and enable investors to reap big rewards.
The new power brokers will place themselves at the
center of these digital ecosystems and quickly master
new digital relationships with their customers, end
users, suppliers, alliance partners, developers, data
sources, makers of smart devices, and specialty talent
sources. All will share the same goal: to grow new
markets and in turn their individual businesses.
#t echvi s i on2015
8 I NTRODUCTI ON
None of this will be easy, but the efort has the
potential for tremendous rewards. The new age of
the digital ecosystem isn’t only about changing
an individual company; it’s about shaping entire
markets. Each enterprise will determine its own
fortunes—and that’s an opportunity that no company
will want to miss.
2015 Vision Trends:
Hallmarks of tomorrow’s
digital business leaders
Technology is moving at a breakneck pace. Social,
mobile, analytics, cloud, and increasingly the Internet
of Things have become driving forces behind the
rapid evolution of digital businesses. This year’s
Accenture Technology Vision highlights ?ve emerging
themes that re?ect the shifts being seen among the
digital power brokers of tomorrow.
1. The Internet of Me is changing the way people
around the world interact through technology, placing
the end user at the center of every digital experience.
2. At the same time, digital devices on the edge are
powering an Outcome Economy and enabling a new
business model that shifts the focus from selling
things to selling results.
3. The Platform (R)evolution re?ects how digital
platforms are becoming the tools of choice for
building next-generation products and services—and
entire ecosystems in the digital and physical worlds.
4. The Intelligent Enterprise is making its machines
smarter—embedding software intelligence into
every aspect of its business to drive new levels of
operational efciency, evolution, and innovation.
5. Advances in more natural human interfaces,
wearable devices, and smart machines are
extending intelligent technology to interact as a
“team member,” working alongside employees in a
Workforce Reimagined.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Collectively, these trends represent the newest
expression of Accenture’s stance that “Every Business
Is a Digital Business.” They also add to Accenture’s
multiyear perspective on technology’s global
tectonic shifts that should impact the strategies and
operational priorities for organizations worldwide.
Historically, the trends in each year’s Accenture
Technology Vision highlight the evolution of a
key technology—some of these technologies are
already central to the digital explorations of many
leading enterprises. Viewed in aggregate, the trends
represent a fundamental shift in the assumptions
that companies must make as they plan for success
in the years to come. Business leaders in every
industry can draw insight and inspiration from these
rich perspectives as they consider where digital
technologies can take their organizations in the future.
But becoming a digital business is no longer simply
about incorporating these technologies into an
organization—it’s about using digital technology to
weave businesses into the broader digital fabric that
extends to customers, partners, employees, and
other industries.
These digital ecosystems are still emerging, but the
proactive enterprises that take the next few years
to de?ne the ecosystems in their own industries
will create their own destiny. The question for every
enterprise is: what role will your company play in this
next important stage of the digital revolution?
Completing the picture
The Accenture Technology Vision comprises a three-
year set of technology trends. While we highlight
the latest trends for each year, it is important to
recognize that each trend represents only part of
the picture. As enterprises continue their journey
toward becoming digital businesses, they will need to
keep up with the latest evolutions in technology and
continue to master those that have been maturing.
These technologies are quickly becoming the base
for how enterprises will build their next generation
of business, as well as the catalysts for many of the
trends that we discuss this year. To reference the full
papers behind the set of trends below, please go to
www.accenture.com/technologyvision.
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10 I NTRODUCTI ON
THE EVOLUTION
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
I NTRODUCTI ON 11
Beyond the cloud: stop talking about
cloud—the value is in using it
No vision would be complete without commenting
on the cloud, but cloud computing is no longer
an emerging trend. The on-demand technology
is pervasive in all decisions made today; the key
question is not “Should we use cloud?” but rather
“How can we use cloud?” What’s more, cloud isn’t
a single concept. Its individual elements—from
software-as-a-service (SaaS) to platform-as-a-service
(PaaS), from public to private—are as distinct and
diferent from one another as the opportunities are
for enterprises to use them. The next phase is putting
the cloud to work and crafting an overarching
approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the
fabric of IT solutions and responses—with business
value the uppermost priority.
Design for analytics: formulate the
questions, and design for the answers
Business intelligence. Data analytics. Big data.
Companies are no longer sufering from a lack of
data—they’re sufering from a lack of the right data.
Business leaders need the right big data to efectively
de?ne the strategic direction of the enterprise. The
current generation of software was designed for
functionality, but the next generation must also be
designed for analytics.
Relationships at scale: moving beyond
transactions to digital relationships
Businesses need to re-think their digital strategies
to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. While
mobile technology, social networks, and context-
based services have increased the number of digital
connections with consumers, most companies are
still creating more detailed views of their consumers,
their attributes, and their transactions. Individually,
these connections may represent new types of user
experiences, even new sets of sales channels—but
that’s not the real opportunity. Taken in aggregate,
digital represents a key new approach to consumer
engagement and loyalty: companies can manage
relationships with consumers, at scale.
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Seamless collaboration: right channel,
right worker, right job
It’s time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its
employees work. The rise in social networking has
breathed new life into collaboration. Users’ new
social behavior and their growing expectation that
every app will be “social” are pushing companies to
create new user experiences. However, to increase
productivity, enterprises must move beyond
standalone social and collaborative channels and
begin to embed them directly into their core business
processes. The new approach is to build social and
collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.
Active defense: adapting cyber security
defenses to the threat
Despite an increasing focus on securing the digital
business, IT departments struggle to keep pace with
recent advances in security technology. Enterprises
know that endpoint security is not enough, but
the move to active defense—risk-based approaches
to security management, analytics-driven event
detection, and re?ex-like incident response—isn’t
yet happening on a broad scale. Although these
technologies are maturing rapidly and communities
are forming to expose the risks, the biggest barrier
is the slow adoption of solutions that already exist.
IT’s core challenge: get current with best practices in
security, get smarter about the new active defense
possibilities, and get real about the journey ahead.
Data velocity: matching the speed of
decision to the speed of action
Business leaders have been bombarded with statistics
about the soaring volume of data that they can mine
for valuable insights. They have been deluged with
articles describing the incredible variety of “external”
data hidden in everything from tweets and blogs to
sensor outputs and GPS data from mobile phones.
But the next perspective on data that deserves
attention is data velocity—the pace with which data
can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in order to
produce insights that managers can act on quickly.
As expectations of near-instant responses become
the norm, business leaders will rely heavily on higher
data velocities to gain a competitive edge.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Software-de?ned networking:
virtualization’s last mile
With virtualization investments already paying of in
servers, and starting to pay of in storage, businesses
must turn their attention to virtualizing the network
in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and
reap the full value of their virtualization investments.
Like other virtualization technologies, software-
de?ned networking (SDN) has the ability to radically
change the ?exibility with which businesses and
IT operate. You may think of networking as a low-
level technology, but this aspect has the ability to
transform enterprises. With SDN, businesses can
?nally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise.
Digital-physical blur: extending
intelligence to the edge
The real world is coming online, as smart objects,
devices, and machines increase our insight into and
control over the physical world. More than just an
“Internet of Things,” this new layer of connected
intelligence augments employees, automates
processes, and incorporates machines into our lives.
For consumers, this provides new levels of
empowerment. In addition to being highly informed,
consumers can interact and in?uence the way they
experience everything around them. For their part,
organizations now get real-time connections to the
real world that allows machines as well as employees
to act and react faster—and more intelligently.
From workforce to crowdsource:
rise of the borderless enterprise
Picture a workforce that extends beyond your
employees, one that consists of any user connected
to the Internet. Cloud, social, and collaboration
technologies now allow organizations to tap into
vast pools of human resources across the world, and
many people are motivated to help. Channeling these
eforts to drive business goals is a challenge, but the
opportunity is enormous. Such an approach can give
every business access to an immense, agile workforce
that not only is better suited to solving some of the
problems that organizations struggle with today, but
will often do so for free.
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14 I NTRODUCTI ON
Data supply chain: putting information
into circulation
Data technologies are evolving rapidly, but most
have been adopted in piecemeal fashion. As a
result, enterprise data is vastly underutilized. Data
ecosystems are complex and littered with data silos,
limiting the value that organizations can get out
of their own data by making it difcult to access.
To truly unlock that value, companies must start
treating data more as a supply chain, enabling
the data to ?ow easily and usefully through the
entire organization—and eventually throughout the
organization’s ecosystem of partners as well.
Harnessing hyperscale: hardware is back
(and never really went away)
Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in
software, the hardware world is now a hotbed of
new development as demand soars for bigger, faster,
and more efcient data centers. Every company will
see the bene?ts of “hyperscale” innovation trickle
into their data centers in the form of cost reduction,
but as companies digitize their businesses, more and
more will see these systems as essential to enabling
their next wave of growth.
Business of applications: software as a
core competency in the digital world
The way we build software is changing. Mimicking
the shift in the consumer world, enterprises are
rapidly moving from applications to apps. Yes,
there will always be big, complex enterprise
software systems to support large organizations,
and IT developers will need to keep customizing
those systems, providing updates and patches,
and more. But now, as organizations push for
greater operational agility, there is a sharp shift
toward simpler, more modular apps. What are the
implications for IT leaders and business leaders?
Soon, they will have to decide who plays what
application development role in their new digital
organizations—and how they can transform the
nature of application development itself.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Architecting resilience: built to survive
failure, the mantra of the nonstop business
In the digital era, businesses are now expected to
support the nonstop demands that their employees
and stakeholders place on business processes,
services, and systems. This shift to support ever-
changing priorities has ripple efects throughout
the organization, especially in the ofce of the chief
information ofcer. There, the need for “always
on” IT infrastructure, security, and business process
economics can mean the diference between business
as usual and the erosion of brand value. As a result,
today’s IT leaders must ensure that their systems are
designed for failure rather than designed to spec.
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16 I NTRODUCTI ON
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
I NTRODUCTI ON 17
The Internet of Me:
Our world, personalized
As everyday objects are going online, so too are experiences—
creating an abundance of digital channels that reach
deep into every aspect of individuals’ lives. Forward-
thinking businesses are changing the ways they build new
applications, products, and services. To gain control over
these points of access, they are creating highly personalized
experiences that engage and exhilarate consumers—without
breaching the customer’s trust. The companies that succeed
in this new “Internet of Me” will become the next generation
of household names.
TREND 1
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18 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
Much of the internet’s appeal has been in the way
it enables each of us to personalize our lives. My
news feed. My playlist. My book recommendations.
My new car, customized online by me.
But as the saying goes, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Enterprises are now actively creating connected
worlds in which their customers’ preferences,
habits, and context are woven together to make
daily experiences simple, delightful, and personal.
Although many companies can already mimic
customer intimacy—as seen in online ads that quickly
re?ect your latest purchases—the new frontier means
something much more authentic and meaningful to
the individual.
What’s happening now is that every experience is
becoming a digital experience as ordinary “things”
become intelligent devices. Today, there are digital
parking meters, smart refrigerators, adaptive security
systems, and much more. These digital devices enable
personalized experiences: there are smart lights
that can react to environmental factors to provide
individual user experiences.
1
Cars can ?ne-tune
their performance by learning the driver’s habits.
2
Whole sports stadiums have been brought online so
individual event-goers can be alerted to shorter lines,
ofered engaging content, and noti?ed of ?ash sales
on nearby food and merchandise.
3
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Experience matters most: 89 percent of business
leaders surveyed by Gartner believe that customer
experience will be their primary basis for competition
by 2016.
4
Beyond mobility: The connected world—including
cars, homes, and wearables—are creating a rapidly
expanding world of access to the customer. Two out
of three of IT and business executives (66 percent) we
surveyed report that smart objects will have a high or
very high impact on their organizations by helping to
advance a company’s industry position or gain
competitive advantage.
Rising consumer demand: Two-thirds of consumers
are expected to purchase a connected home device
within the next ?ve years, and the ownership of
consumer wearables is expected to double year over
year by 2016.
5
Contextual experiences: Big data analytics
solutions, combined with the proliferation of edge
devices collecting highly contextual data, are
allowing businesses to craft experiences that are
unique for each user.
Personalization everywhere: Businesses everywhere,
not just “tech companies,” are using personalization
to build a better experience. Companies integrating
personalization with their core product or service are
?nding a signi?cant competitive advantage. Sixty
percent of organizations we surveyed indicate they
are seeing a positive ROI on their investments in
personalization technologies.
WHY NOW?
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20 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
In fact, in our survey, companies shared that they are
exploring a variety of emerging channels to engage
customers including: wearables (62 percent), connected
TVs (68 percent), connected cars (59 percent), and
smart objects (64 percent). These, and countless
similar examples, are coalescing into the “Internet
of Me.” This describes the emerging interconnected
environment in which businesses are building
products and services to be designed for, created for,
and speci?cally centered on the individual.
This signals a wholesale change in the way businesses
must design applications. It means much more than
just “personalization for the connected world.”
Now, the focus has to be on experience—and
success means making people the center of business
decisions. Features and functionality must re?ect
what individuals are trying to accomplish, enabling
them to control, measure, and even automate parts
of their lives in both the digital and physical worlds.
Leading companies are already moving fast in
this direction—and reframing the competitive
conversation in their industries. In our Vision survey,
81 percent place the personalized customer
experience in their top three priorities for their
organization, with 39 percent reporting it as their
top priority. The new connected car from Mercedes-
Benz, for instance, includes application programming
interface (API) connections to Nest thermostats at
the driver’s home.
6
The car can notify the thermostat
when the driver will arrive, and the thermostat in
turn adjusts the in-home temperature to the driver’s
desired settings. Appliance-maker Whirlpool is
making similar Internet of Me moves: its smart dryers
include a function that allows environmentally
conscious consumers to schedule energy-intensive
tasks for when electricity is more abundant and rates
are lower.
7
Fashion and apparel leader Ralph Lauren,
in line with the quanti?ed-self movement, has
developed a sensor-embedded athletic shirt that
tracks activity and heart rate.
8
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For more and more companies, this new focus on
exhilarating, user-centric experiences is paying of.
Sixty percent of our survey respondents report
positive results from their investments in personalization
technologies. These numbers will only improve as
companies gain sophistication in this space, and
quickly become the foundation for the next
generation of business. Gartner research shows that
89 percent of companies believe that customer
experience will be their primary basis for competition
by 2016, versus 36 percent four years ago.
9
The momentum is here and now: devices are
becoming more interconnected and consumers
continue to demonstrate their demand for these
“smart” devices. It is therefore incumbent on business
leaders to start reworking their products, services
and business processes accordingly. Businesses
that embrace the Internet of Me concept will ?nd
themselves sustaining higher levels of engagement,
and in turn, opening up whole new vistas for growth.
For the businesses that don’t soon take advantage
of the growing prevalence and constancy of
connectivity, their competitors surely will.
The new battleground
for mindshare
Customer mindshare across the Internet of Me is up
for grabs since there are few preconceived notions
of what to expect and few strong players—thus far.
Capturing mindshare will be critically important for
every company looking to migrate from crowded
existing channels toward new opportunities. In its
new context, mindshare is not just about building
awareness of the company’s oferings across
emerging channels—that’s just the beginning. The
goal is to command the user’s attention through
engaging and delightful experiences. Companies
will then have the ability to pitch new products and
services or to act as gatekeepers for other businesses
that want to access users through these new channels.
To understand the expanded concept of mindshare
and the value it can generate, consider Facebook:
approximately 70 percent of smartphone owners
are active users of the social network, opening the
app an average of 14 times a day.
10
The service has
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22 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
become nearly synonymous with social interaction in
the same way that Google has with search. Because
Google and Facebook hold such large swaths of
consumer mindshare, they have become the de facto
platforms upon which other businesses advertise
and deliver new services. To put words into numbers:
Facebook’s ad revenue for Q3 2014 grew by 64 percent
year over year, with mobile ads accounting for
66 percent of the growth.
11
With each evolution of technology, businesses have
competed across new channels to gain customer
mindshare. As the Web became ubiquitous in homes,
companies invested in building new architectures
to capture the mindshare of the emerging “online
consumer.” Similarly, now that smartphones account
for nearly two-thirds of the mobile phone market,
enterprises are investing heavily in mobility. Mobility
investments have rewarded companies that have
pursued them, and new business models have
developed exclusively around apps. Uber and Lyft, the
ride-share services, are just two examples of “mobile-
only” companies that are disrupting segments of the
transportation industry.
The Internet of Me raises the “mindshare” stakes.
Now, the shift is from mobility to the Internet of
Things (IoT)—and this time the opportunity is bigger.
Rather than just one channel, like the PC or phone,
the convergence of the digital and physical worlds is
creating hundreds of potential channels that reach
deep into every aspect of people’s lives. An Acquity
Group study con?rms that consumer adoption of
IoT devices is growing exponentially: the report
found that nearly two-thirds of consumers intend to
purchase a connected home device by 2019, while
the ownership of wearable technology is expected to
have doubled year over year by 2016.
12
This latest technology shift provides the best of
two worlds: the intelligence, personalization, and
adaptability of digital technology blended with the
interactive and immersive experience of the real world.
As consumer adoption grows, businesses have the
opportunity to de?ne how people will use these new
devices; how they will connect with one another;
and what form the interactions will take. Controlling
those experiences is a lucrative role that is entirely
up for grabs.
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Take AT&T Drive—AT&T’s connected car platform—
as an example of how businesses can ?nd multiple
opportunities within a single channel. Nearly every
major auto manufacturer is investing in building
connected cars, yet few have the necessary networking
and software experience to build an end-to-end solution.
AT&T Drive provides them with a suite of features
that they can pick from rather than having to build
everything themselves. But AT&T is also using the
connected car as a platform to grow consumer
mindshare: the company now allows customers to
include connected cars—such as the Audi Q3—in its
shared data plans for no more than it costs to add a
tablet to a plan.
13
Leading companies such as AT&T see that, for now,
the competition for the Internet of Me is meager.
But they sense that the opportunity is vast—and they
know that they can gain an enduring advantage if
they successfully and consistently deliver outstanding
consumer experiences.
Turning mindshare
into value
As businesses grow their mindshare across new
channels, they can leverage their position to
deliver new products and services that enhance
each individual’s Internet of Me. Certainly, greater
mindshare can lead to greater wallet share. For
instance, Coca-Cola Amatil increased sales by 12
percent after retro?tting vending machines with
touchscreens, video cameras, and Microsoft Kinect
technology to create a fresh, personalized vending
experience. But driving sales is only one way to
bene?t from this new access to the consumer: the
data created by these connected vending machines
is enabling the Southeast Asian beverage company
to make better decisions about cooler placement,
restocking, and more.
14
Businesses will ?nd value in the ways they
personalize their products or services. Geography,
culture, and varied individual needs will all impact
how businesses scale their Internet of Me solutions.
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24 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
For example, in some regions there is a higher value
on societal bene?ts than on individual bene?ts; any
Internet of Me strategy should carefully consider
local preferences. No one solution ?ts all—every
company will ?rst need to determine which channels
best suit their needs and then build unique solutions
for those channels.
Georgia Power, a utilities provider, is driving new
customer value by leveraging its network of 2.4 million
smart meters. The company now ofers consumers
access to their real-time data generated by the
meters so they can gain a deeper understanding of
their energy use. Georgia Power is even attracting
new business by ofering personalized services such
as pre-paid and pay-as-you-go billing—allowing the
company to serve customers who do not have good
credit and cannot aford a security deposit.
15
A key point here is that “ordinary” traditional
companies—not hot tech startups—are making these
moves. Companies such as Coca-Cola Amatil, and
Georgia Power are gaining more access to consumer
mindshare by ofering pervasive experiences in
traditional settings. By focusing on the very things
that made them leaders in their markets in the ?rst
place, traditional companies have natural advantages
in the Internet of Me.
Experience matters most
in the Internet of Me
Ultimately, success in the Internet of Me will be driven
by how businesses deliver the individual experiences
that consumers demand. Many businesses are already
aware of this: 62 percent of organizations attribute
their investments in omni-channel initiatives to the
simple fact that their customers expect it—but only
a few agree that they are doing it well.
16
While
companies have been experimenting with
personalization to one degree or another for years,
today, the abundance of data and sensors can
provide a much more complete picture from which
companies can personalize their products and
services at scale.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Case in point: PhysIQ is a device-agnostic analytics
platform that healthcare professionals are using to
leverage the new types of data being generated by IoT
devices such as ?tness trackers. The health-monitoring
platform can pull data from any combination of devices,
aggregate it, and deliver a single, comprehensive
health score. The score is intimately personalized:
data is constantly generated by whichever devices
the user chooses, and the platform learns individual
habits and tendencies over time. This makes PhysIQ
much more efective in predicting and alerting
healthcare providers to any anomalies.
17
It’s essential to emphasize that there is no singular
personalization strategy. Each solution is dependent
on what tools, data streams, and feedback loops
a business has access to and how it chooses to
integrate these data sources to build personalization
into its products and services. Macy’s, the department
store, is personalizing its traditional brick-and-
mortar experience by using iBeacons to send push
noti?cations to in-store shoppers. The alerts use data
from Shopkick, an app that lets shoppers browse,
“favorite,” and discover new items from the Macy’s
catalog. The messages instantly notify shoppers
which of their favorites are available in-store, and
then deliver customized discounts on those items.
18
Eighty-one percent of executives we surveyed
place the personalized customer experience in
their top three priorities for their organization,
with 39 percent reporting it as their top priority. To
truly become a leader in the Internet of Me space,
businesses will have to ?gure out how the customer
experience they “own” relates to other experiences
in the customer’s life or how they can help to deliver
the outcomes that a customer is trying to achieve.
One good example is Automatic. Primarily a car
diagnostic device, drivers can use the device for
other tasks as well—like sending a canned text to
pre-selected contacts whenever they park their
vehicles near a supermarket.
19
This automated task
is powered by Automatic’s integration with If This
Then That (IFTTT)—a free service that helps connected
devices communicate with each other. Belkin, Nest,
and Philips all have a number of IFTTT “recipes” that
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26 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
let individuals mix experiences, such as lighting
conditions and temperature, all based on where they
are or what they are doing—and all without touching
a switch or taking out a phone.
20
Because the user
de?nes the relationships and picks the recipes, the
resulting experiences are both in?nitely personalized
and scalable.
The power of ecosystems
Greater opportunities for personalization will
emerge as individual businesses realize they are not
the only participants in any given Internet of Me.
Finding new partnerships that combine channels and
services to bene?t the individual will prove lucrative
for companies that execute against this idea. Take
Samsung, for example. The consumer electronics
giant is building a wide range of connected big-
box products such as refrigerators. These physical
products now represent an interface to the digital
world that other businesses can use to their
advantage—as Pandora is already doing.
Pandora had been facing the challenge of growing
its share of the in-home music listening market. The
music streaming service accepted Samsung’s ofer to
be one of the ?rst integrated apps because it saw the
refrigerator as a platform with immense potential
for helping the company break into the market
for “home listening.”
21
Now users can tune in to
personalized radio stations in the place where a great
deal of in-home listening happens: the kitchen.
Optimizing a strategy for the interconnected world
starts with determining a company’s role in the Internet
of Me. As companies begin to specialize, some will
build devices, others will develop applications and
oferings on top of those devices, and others still will
build the platforms that other providers plug into.
Nike’s shift in its FuelBand strategy indicates that leading
businesses are already thinking this way. Initially, Nike
built the FuelBand device and maintained the app that
tracked and shared users’ runs. However, the sportswear
company discontinued hardware production in favor
of operating as a data analytics provider in this space.
22
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By opting to focus on speci?c elements of the
experience (data, analytics, and insights), Nike is
better positioned to become a partner in, rather than
competing for a share of, the wearable device market.
Delivering a billion or more personalized experiences
every day is no small feat, yet this is what tomorrow’s
platforms will be required to do in the Internet of
Me. As businesses start to identify their niches in this
new environment, they will do well to shortlist the
partners with which they can best collaborate and
aggregate mindshare. By ofering APIs and data that
are open and accessible to others in their ecosystems,
constituent players will acquire the power of
businesses that are many times their size. Seventy-
two percent of executives we surveyed expect
that within the next two years, they will see broad
adoption of industry platforms that will integrate
data with digital business partners.
Technology enables,
but trust endures
As businesses create personalized experiences, they
necessarily receive troves of personal data about
consumers, their habits, and their preferences. To
be comfortable sharing their data, consumers must
have trust in the other party. This trust acts as a bond
between the business and the consumer, and allows
product and service adoption to ?ourish.
However, consumers are likely to seek alternatives and
exit a relationship when trust is broken, particularly
if that broken trust leads to adverse impacts in the
real world. A recent Accenture survey reveals that
67 percent of individuals are willing to share data with
companies, but that percentage drops to 27 percent
if the business is sharing data with a third party.
23
Since data collection and sharing have direct
implications on a company’s ability to compete for
mindshare in the Internet of Me, digital businesses must
improve their competency within three components
of trust: security, privacy, and transparency.
72
%
Expect that within the
next two years, they will
see broad adoption of
industry platforms that will
integrate data with digital
business partners.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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Irresponsible handling of data is quickly becoming
a corporate risk—in terms of reputation, customer
attrition, and regulatory compliance. Throughout
the data supply chain, protecting customer data is
fundamental to attracting and retaining consumer trust.
In the age of big data, companies can take a number
of security-related precautions to hedge against risks
and still maintain integration with legacy systems.
Hive for Hadoop ofers SQL-like query tools to present
unstructured data in a relational format. Also, limiting
queries by restricting access to classi?ed data ofers
another level of protection for shared data.
New data protection measures can be seen in the
strategies of both Apple and Google: encrypted ?le
systems are the default in iOS 8 and Android L.
24
Importantly, the decryption key now resides on the
user’s phone, outside of the corporation, shifting the
burden of data protection from the provider to the user.
Each company may require unique security solutions
to address its own set of risks. The most immediate
imperative is to ensure that software and security
controls are able to address the latest risks and that
a plan is in place for responding to new risks in a
timely fashion. Monitoring what data is accessed, by
whom, and why is becoming a critical function of
maintaining trust. This is particularly important as
consumers adopt smart devices for everything from
pacemakers to home security systems.
The traditional notion of privacy, the second
component of trust, is evolving and becoming
far more complex. Regulators are becoming more
active in de?ning public policy with “do not track”
legislation emerging in the European Union and the
State of California.
At the very least, businesses need to ensure compliance
with their terms of use and privacy policies. This may
seem obvious, but all too frequently, commitments
are unintentionally violated by employees with good
intentions for innocuous reasons.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
85
%
Say that the average
consumer has very
limited insight into how
organizations are using data
related to them.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
Third-party compliance audits of adherence to
privacy requirements are a positive step toward
building trust. While conducting regular and
pervasive audits is a step forward, disclosing results
to stakeholders is a giant leap. This proposition
becomes more complex as companies increasingly
share data. Sharing data through APIs or appending
metadata through DRM-capable systems are ways to
automate and manage exposure of privacy audits.
As the ?nal component of trust, companies must be
transparent about their practices with customers.
An astounding 85 percent of organizations say
that while the amount of data they have related
to the average consumer is growing, consumers
themselves have very little insight into how it is
used. For example, many companies have recently
faced scrutiny for experimenting with user data.
In one experiment, an online dating site purposely
manipulated the “match percentage” between
prospective partners. As a result, users were shown
an arti?cially high score prior to connecting
with a potential match.
25
Some saw this lack of
transparency as particularly egregious because it
negated the very service users expected while using
the site.
However, experiments with SaaS users are
commonplace—often simply referred to as “user
testing,” with the goal of improving and delivering a
better service. But gone are the days when sufcient
transparency meant mere legal compliance—where
users accepted the privacy policy and terms of use
simply through signing up or clicking an “accept”
button. In order to be more transparent, businesses
need to inform users in a way that is both easy to
understand and relevant to the services provided.
The Personal Genome Project has rede?ned “informed
consent” by requiring a perfect score on a test
before participants can even enter their name. Sage
Bionetworks, a non-pro?t organization, and Lookout,
a mobile security ?rm, have taken a similar approach
and present users with interactive policy forms to
provide consent.
27
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30 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
It is not possible to overstate the increasing importance
of trust in gaining market share and user adoption of
data-rich products and services. Look no further than
the high-pro?le resignations of the CEO and CIO of
Target to see a new level of importance placed on trust
that is based on security, privacy, and transparency.
Maintaining trust, as well as the policies and practices
that drive it, is now a foundational component for
success as a digital business.
Looking ahead
The rise in the importance of trust is one clear
indication that the old adage, “Always put the
customer ?rst,” has taken on new meaning in
the digital age. Empowered consumers can put
themselves ?rst with the help of new technologies
that have given rise to the anytime, anywhere
Internet of Me. Customers increasingly want
better, faster, and cheaper all at once. In response,
companies must create new ways to capture
attention, deliver new services, and build trust.
Over time, new market ecosystems will emerge to
deliver digitally enabled, highly personalized, and
acceptably secure ofers to inform, sell, and service
customers. In a world where the virtual is migrating
to the physical, each person’s experience will difer
slightly. Companies will need to tailor their products
or services to the unique afnities of each individual.
What will your role be in the evolving Internet of Me?
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Over the next 100 days, commit your business to
gaining a deeper understanding of who your core
users are and identify opportunities to better serve
their individual needs.
• Start using your customer data to discover what
connected devices they currently use/intend to
purchase and what their goals are with the new
technology. Identify more granular segments
within your user base to accommodate future
personalization strategies.
• Review and begin to update your consumer
engagement processes and governance strategy.
Prepare to shift toward a world where every
customer has a unique view of your product,
and your product is increasingly in?uenced by
ecosystem partners.
• Evaluate competitors for their use of mass
personalization strategies. Take note of pinnacle
personalization experiences and how big data
analytics are used to deliver them. Use this
opportunity to learn what companies in related
industries are doing as well.
• Identify emerging edge technologies that can
supplement your existing product or service by
providing either new channels to your customer
or new data for contextual insights. Look to early
adopters for inspiration and best practices in
leveraging these devices.
• Appoint a cross-functional team to champion
and develop the end-user experience. Building
a strategy for the Internet of Me begins with
bringing the individual’s voice to the table.
• Assess your current back-end architecture and
data storage. In order to support a personalization
strategy at scale, the company will require
hardware that can support the increased load and
speed necessary for real-time action. Determine
what investments the company will have to make.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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32 TREND 1: THE I NTERNET OF ME
By this time next year, your business should be
prepared to start extending oferings across the
Internet of Me, providing new levels of service and
personalization to your customers.
• Commission a pilot that leverages new channels
of access to the consumer. Incorporate your user
research to make experience and personalization
priorities in this new product or service.
• Determine where your company holds a
competitive advantage, or existing role, within your
users’ Internet of Me. Some possibilities include:
building devices/products, software, and apps;
providing data analytics and insights; or facilitating
seamlessly integrated experiences.
• Develop an ecosystem strategy that will allow you
to work with a portfolio of potential partners. The
resulting strategy should play to the strengths of
each company, allowing them to specialize in their
roles and deliver a complete end-user experience.
• Proactively address security issues that could leave
sensitive customer data exposed or physical devices
vulnerable to attack or failure. As new pilots and
projects are developed, connect with internal and
external subject matter experts to identify threat
pro?les and areas for improvement.
• Privacy policies must be completely overhauled
and created to re?ect a transparent, trust-centric
mindset. Carefully account for the new relationship
your business will have with consumers and their
data and how they will interact in the real world.
• Create a trust task force that is integrated across all
business units. Help leaders go beyond compliance
to make trust and privacy a seamless part of
business development in an efort to mitigate
corporate risk and liability.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
The Outcome Economy:
Hardware producing
hard results
Intelligent hardware is bridging the last mile between
the digital enterprise and the physical world. As leading
enterprises come face-to-face with the Internet of Things,
they are uncovering opportunities to embed hardware and
sensors in their digital toolboxes. They are using these highly
connected hardware components to give customers what
they really want: not more products or services, but more
meaningful outcomes. These “digital disrupters” know that
getting ahead is no longer about selling things—it’s about
selling results. Welcome to the “outcome economy.”
TREND 2
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34 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
How much would you pay to laugh out loud? If you
were a patron of a pay-per-laugh Teatreneu theater
company production in Barcelona, the answer would
be €0.30 for each instance.
1
Teatreneu uses facial
recognition technology to register each laugh and
charges customers accordingly—up to €24 per show,
a 25 percent increase over previous ticket prices.
And, if you live in the smart city of Los Angeles,
there’s a good chance you have bene?ted from
one of 7,000 smart parking spaces. The hockey
puck-sized sensors, which Streetline installs in
the roadbeds of the cities and campuses where it
operates, communicate real-time parking conditions
to smartphone apps, telling drivers where parking
is available. These connected parking spaces have
delivered tangible outcomes to drivers and to the
city, increasing parking revenue by 2 percent, while
simultaneously decreasing the average cost of
parking by 11 percent and increasing space utilization
by 11 percent.
2
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Hardware is approachable: More businesses and
individuals are able to leverage a vast ecosystem of
tools to design, produce, and distribute hardware
than ever before. It’s no longer necessary to be a tech
?rm to build hardware.
M2M economics: Cost reductions are driving
machine-to-machine (M2M) investments: 45 percent
of global consumer electronics executives cited
declining costs as driving their M2M investments in
2014, up from 27 percent in 2013.
3
Sensor efciency: Sensors are cheaper, smaller, and
more energy efcient than ever before, allowing
more sensors to be installed in more places and
maintained for longer periods of time at the edge of
networks without the need to service or replace them
for two to ?ve years.
M2M standards: Machine-to-machine
communication standards are closer to reaching
maturity, allowing for more localized and real-time
decisions at the edge of networks. In 2014, 22 percent
of organizations had M2M solutions in place, and
42 percent of the rest expect to implement M2M
solutions by 2016; by 2017, 75 percent of
organizations will have M2M as part of their
strategic roadmaps.
4
Ubiquitous bandwidth: High-bandwidth, wired, and
wireless communications are now ubiquitous in most
markets. Trafc from wireless and mobile devices
will be 54 percent of all trafc, exceeding trafc
from wired devices by 2016. By 2018, global ?xed
broadband speeds will reach an average of 42 Mbps,
up from 16 Mbps in 2013.
5
WHY NOW?
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36 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
These are just two glimpses of the emerging
outcome economy in which digital businesses
increasingly sell solutions and results rather than
just products and services. The outcome economy is
de?ned by the ability of companies to create value
by delivering solutions to customers that in turn
lead to quanti?able results. This is made possible
by hardware becoming increasingly intelligent,
otherwise known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
From smart industrial equipment to the bevy of
sensors in the modern smartphone, companies now
have the tools to gain end-to-end insights into the
outcomes that their customers are trying to achieve.
What’s more, this same technology allows companies
to discover the metrics, or measures of value, by
which their customers de?ne success. In efect, these
metrics enable businesses to identify, measure, and
aim for their customers’ desired outcomes.
6
By placing intelligent hardware at the edge—where
the digital and physical worlds intersect—84 percent
of our Vision survey respondents agree they can
gain a deeper level of understanding of both how
products are being used and the detailed outcomes
customers are trying to achieve.
Harbingers of the
outcome economy
The underlying principle of an outcome economy is
not new: marketers have long talked about selling
solutions rather than products. Decades ago, Harvard
University marketing professor Theodore “Ted”
Levitt was famously said to have told his students
that people didn’t want quarter-inch drill bits; they
wanted quarter-inch holes. However, the outcome
economy has been notoriously difcult to grow,
because there have been few efective ways of deeply
and continually discerning what customers want.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Digital technology is now resolving that difculty—so
much so that the outcome economy is no longer just
an aspiration; it is very much here and now. In fact,
it’s a strategic transformation for big companies in
every industry as well as a disruptive opportunity
for startups. The early adopters are tying feedback
from embedded hardware and sensors to their
digital systems, giving them the end-to-end insights
necessary to understand and in?uence outcomes. A
few examples prove the point.
Not long ago, Monsanto acquired Climate Corporation,
a maker of farm intelligence software that integrates
with precision agriculture sensors and systems to
deliver intelligence about current and future weather,
soil, and crop conditions. With the acquisition,
Monsanto is able to ofer growers actionable insights
on how to reduce risks, improve yields, and increase
pro?ts. The agrochemical giant can now not only
recommend the most pro?table crops to plant, but
also what types of seed to buy, when to plant, how
to tend the crops, when to harvest, what yields to
expect, and even what revenue farmers can expect
at the end of the growing season.
7
The end-to-end knowledge that Monsanto can now
gather powers its ability to improve outcomes for
growers. Today, farmers are able to buy ?eld-speci?c
weather-related crop insurance that guarantees
?nancial outcomes and hedges against the risk
presented by increasingly variable and extreme
weather events. It’s not a stretch to envision a future
in which precision irrigation systems, integrated
with these decision support systems, then take
autonomous action based on sensor data of soil
moisture and precise weather forecasts.
In the auto industry, Tesla Motors found a way to use
hardware on the edge to deliver safety outcomes to
consumers beyond what was previously possible. In
late 2013, the luxury electric car maker saw several
instances of the battery packs in its Model S cars
equipped with the Smart Air Suspension option
catching ?re after being punctured by road debris at
highway speeds. Instead of following the traditional
auto industry protocol of issuing a costly recall and
waiting for customers to bring their vehicles in for
#t echvi s i on2015
38 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
service, Tesla made use of the intelligent hardware
in every car to distribute a ?rmware update to the
afected cars, which increased their minimum ground
clearance and prevented them from automatically
lowering at freeway speeds.
8
When Tesla devised
a longer-term solution, it returned the original
functionality to the afected vehicles and gave
owners the option of bringing their cars in for a
free retro?t of its sturdier undercarriage armor.
The diagnosis of the problem and improved safety
outcomes for Tesla customers were possible only
because the manufacturer had end-to-end feedback
from and the ability to update the computer systems
in those drivers’ cars.
This emphasis on outcomes is also seen in the
pharmaceuticals sector, where Proteus Digital Health
is focused on improving patient outcomes as a new
way to create value in that industry. The digital
health company integrates a tiny, inert sensor in
the pills it produces; the sensor acts in concert with
a wearable device and mobile app to provide full
“adherence transparency” for patients, healthcare
providers, and payers. Not only can the Proteus
hardware-based system determine when patients
take their medications, but it also can send alerts
and reminders to the individual if they forget to
take a pill. With this approach, Proteus can help
patients increase the efectiveness of their treatment,
demonstrate cost savings over traditional methods of
care, and drive better overall outcomes for patients,
payers, and providers—the proverbial “win-win-win”
situation.
9
There is no shortage of trailblazing examples
across a variety of other industries. The one big
point that bears underlining: edge intelligence—
and the hardware that powers it—is not a digital
phenomenon that bene?ts only high-tech companies.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Hardware at the edge
The levels of insight and control that are the
hallmarks of the outcome economy are only made
possible through the integration of hardware with
existing capabilities. Cloud-based software analytics
and visualization technologies, along with hardware
sensors and increased computing capabilities at the
edge, are all necessary components in the outcome
economy. As intelligence moves steadily and rapidly
toward the network’s edge, it efectively builds a
bridge of data-rich feedback loops that span the “last
mile” between customers and businesses. Companies
that incorporate this next generation of edge
intelligence are seeing their performance per unit
cost soar.
Just one quick example: Nest, the intelligent home
products company, pushed new software to its
Nest Protect devices and consequently halved the
incidence of false ?re alarms—delivering greater
safety and trust outcomes to its customers. The
company’s smoke and carbon monoxide alarms
featured embedded, low-cost, but dormant humidity
sensors. Armed with aggregated anonymous data
from hundreds of thousands of its deployed devices,
Nest was able to re?ne and improve its detection
algorithms. But, to do so, it needed humidity data. So
the next software update sent to products in the ?eld
activated the dormant humidity sensor and improved
the performance of the installed devices.
10
Having this bevy of sensors in a device such
as a smoke alarm would have seemed ?scally
irresponsible just a few years ago, but as unit
shipments have soared, the cost of sensors has
plummeted. Between 2006 and 2013, shipments of
micro-electromechanical sensors (MEMS)—analog
microchips for measuring things in the real world—
for consumer devices have grown at 32 percent year-
over-year to eight billion units.
11
In four years, the
Samsung Galaxy smartphone went from having three
sensors in the ?rst-generation model in 2010 to 10 in
the ?fth-generation model in 2014.
12
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40 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
Sensors are also getting more sensitive and
signi?cantly less expensive. In mid-2014, Broadcom
released the WICED Sense Development Kit. The kit
includes a full software development stack, a mobile
app to view real-time sensor data, and a device
the size of a key fob with ?ve MEMS: gyroscope,
accelerometer, pressure, humidity, and temperature—
all of which retails for $20.
13
Other embedded and
expandable solutions such as Raspberry Pi, Intel
Galileo, and Marvell Kinoma also help makers embed
sensors in just about anything so they can rapidly
prototype and create new hardware-centric
products in far less time and at much lower cost
than ever before.
Cresting the hurdle
of hardware
Leading businesses, large and small, are using
hardware and its ability to bring them closer to their
customers as a diferentiator and as a way to enter
new markets.
But what exactly is meant by “hardware”? In this
context, the de?nition is not con?ned to traditional
IT categories—servers, networking gear, PCs, and so
on. The concept is far broader than that. It includes
the IoT and devices that range from smart washing
machines, wearables, and security cameras to
autonomous cars and intelligent buildings.
Today’s hardware ofers capabilities that parallel the
advancements that were made in software more than
a decade ago and ampli?ed in the as-a-service world.
It is not a stretch to say that as intelligent hardware
becomes cheaper to create and easier to integrate,
it is efectively becoming the new software. In our
survey, nearly two thirds (64 percent) of respondents
indicated their company was either using or
experimenting with emerging channels such as smart
objects (parking meters, smart appliances, robots, etc.),
connected TVs (68 percent), and connected cars
(59 percent) to engage customers.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Hardware is indeed becoming much easier to make:
it can be designed, produced, and distributed by
small teams with signi?cantly fewer resources than
what was required just 10 years ago. Sociometric
Solutions, a social-sensing analytics ?rm that helps
service-based organizations improve productivity and
drive sales growth, has experienced this ?rsthand.
In 2005, when the company was a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Media Lab startup, its founders
had to write their own operating system for the
name-badge device whose embedded sensors can
track a person’s location, interaction, body movement,
and speech dynamics.
14
Eight years later, when the
company redesigned its badge as an independent
startup, it was able to use an embedded Linux kernel
and add modular capabilities to the software stack,
enabling development to happen four times faster at
less than half the cost.
15
LIFX, an Australian connected
lighting startup, went from concept to hardware,
?rmware, and software to shipping in 12 months.
16
Today, there are more and more resources to help
enterprises master the hardware dimension of the
outcome economy.
Many manufacturers and manufacturing services
companies are setting up specialized units with this
in mind. Hardware accelerators, just one segment
of this movement, are launching at an astonishing
pace: at the start of 2013, there were three top-tier
hardware accelerators globally; just a year and a half
later, there were 15.
17
For example, PCH is a provider of end-to-end product
development and supply chain solutions. In 2013, the
company launched Highway1, a hardware accelerator
designed to help hardware startups navigate the
complexities of launching a new product. Hardware
accelerators such as Highway1 and competitor
Flextronics’ Lab IX are making it possible for startups,
many of which are crowdfunded, to deliver products
to their customers on time and within budget.
The “crowdfunding factor” is important to the
development of intelligent hardware. Between 2011
and 2013, there were 443 hardware campaigns on
Kickstarter and Indiegogo that raised more than
$100,000 apiece. Nearly 10 percent of those have
gone on to raise venture capital, averaging an initial
#t echvi s i on2015
42 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
investment of $8.7 million each.
18
In fact, many new
companies are using their seed rounds of funding to
launch highly professional crowdfunding campaigns
in order to gain valuable insights about product/
market ?t and test pricing strategies. A handful of
notable examples are: Scanadu, Mis?t Wearables,
Oculus VR (Oculus was later acquired by Facebook for
$2 billion), Canary (home security), and LIFX (smart
light bulbs).
Large, long-established enterprises are already
active participants in the push to make hardware
more accessible, usable, and results focused. GE is
an investor in Quirky, an acclaimed marketplace
and crowdsource design community, building
both smart (connected) and traditional products.
For its connected products, Quirky has launched
its own connected device platform, Wink—a type
of standards and certi?cation body with its own
hardware hub that enables smartphones and
other devices to connect with and program Wink-
compatible products as well as smart products from
more than a dozen other brands.
19
This not only
provides a way for devices from dozens of previously
isolated or siloed brands to interoperate, but also
makes it easier to build capacity for intelligence at
the edge.
With every new intelligent device and every new
industry group supporting hardware development,
the promise of the outcome economy comes that
much closer.
Signposts of transformation
at the edge
One of the most signi?cant markers of the shift
toward hardware on the edge is the coalescing
of standards for inter-device communication.
Companies that are keen to engage in the outcome
economy now should tune into the standards
discussion and decide where they want to participate
in de?ning the future of their industry and others.
Sitting on the sidelines at this stage will mean
allowing others to de?ne the way businesses will
compete in the future.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that a standards war has
erupted. Prior to 2014, the only large-scale standards
body in the IoT space was the AllSeen Alliance,
promoting and expanding the use of AllJoyn, a
software framework and core set of system services
that allow edge devices to communicate. In 2014,
a half-dozen more industry groups, certi?cation
bodies, and standards organizations joined the fray.
Several focus on the connected home, while others
concentrate on industrial applications at various
levels of the stack.
It’s still too early to tell which consortia will have
the most in?uence over the long term. But, the
fact that so many groups are coalescing in the
?rst place underscores the importance of the role
that intelligent hardware will play in our collective
future. Enterprises must not wait for a clear winner
to emerge, as the standards landscape will likely be
fragmented for many years. The key will be for each
company to join the consortium that best ?ts its
digital strategies and to learn by collaborating with
fellow participants.
What businesses must
do next
Of course, with every step forward by a Tesla, Monsanto,
or hardware startup, customers are conditioned to
expect more. Yesterday’s automobile ?rmware upgrade
will become tomorrow’s baseline expectation.
The shift toward the IoT powers the outcome
economy and prioritizes data-rich feedback loops
that help companies get to know the outcomes that
their customers want and improve performance on
the metrics that matter. Today, most companies still
make tools that their customers have to con?gure
to create the outcomes they desire. These tools are
usually functional, but they often require much
more work to satisfy the real needs of customers—
such as customizable of-the-shelf software that
still requires a team of developers to con?gure and
maintain. Now, for the ?rst time, companies can gain
quanti?able, end-to-end insights into the outcomes
their customers are trying to achieve and use those
insights to develop signi?cantly more efective products.
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44 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
To take advantage of these new capabilities,
businesses need to start by re-evaluating their
customers’ intended outcomes. They must establish
feedback loops wherever their customers create
value. Then, they need to incorporate the resulting
insights into their business processes and product
management systems.
To begin, businesses would do well to map feedback
loops throughout product and service lifecycles,
paying special attention to how many steps away
from customer outcomes the farthest collection
points are located. The goal is to move feedback
loops as close to customer outcomes as possible in
order to ?gure out what the desired outcomes are
and how to in?uence them. Acting on these insights
will help to re?ne the critical data that needs to be
collected and the types of hardware that need to be
in place to take action—either through mobility or
app solutions (informing a person at the right time)
or machine solutions that automate corrective actions.
When adding new hardware, companies can develop
the competency to build it themselves, as Nike did
with FuelBand, or they can partner with or acquire
companies as Google did with Motorola, Nest, and
Dropcam.
In many cases, new hardware solutions, or the
integration of sensors in existing hardware, will
help to push the edge of the network closer to
the customer. In more challenging cases, new
partnerships or acquisitions might be required to
enable new capabilities at the edge—and to unlock
the greatest of opportunities, wholly new business
models may well be necessary.
The possibilities are far-reaching and can play out across
industries. Consider the utilities sector, for instance.
Companies such as SolarCity are going beyond the
meter to own, install, and operate infrastructure on their
customers’ premises. They have end-to-end insights
and control over the outcomes their customers want.
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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
In doing so, SolarCity gains long-term, stable cash
?ows and removes the customer payback risks of
renewable energy by guaranteeing economic
outcomes up front.
20
In fact, SolarCity has been so
successful that utilities are starting to see its business
model as a threat to their survival.
The IoT transition presents an opportunity for
utilities and their regulators to pursue a future
where the edges of utility networks stretch beyond
the meter and into the homes and businesses of
their customers. This transition could simultaneously
ofer utilities more control over the grid, while also
delivering improved outcomes for customers and the
environment. Consider Facebook’s Open Compute
Project, an open initiative to crowdsource the design
of energy-efcient servers for data centers, which
was able to realize $1.2 billion in energy savings for
Facebook.
21
If utilities could manage infrastructure
on their customers’ premises, it might make sense
for them to form, say, Open Furnace and Open Air
Conditioning projects, delivering the outcomes
that customers want, as well as the end-to-end
control that utilities need to conserve energy,
manage the grid, and build robust demand response
infrastructure.
This hypothetical opportunity ofers a glimpse of
how disruptive companies can be when they nudge
the edges of their networks just a step or two closer
to their customers. When companies gain end-to-
end feedback loops that extend all the way to the
intersection of the digital and physical worlds, true
disruption can occur. This is the value unlocked by
the outcome economy.
The hardware imperative
The outcome economy upends long-held notions
of how superior products and services are de?ned.
Delivering customer outcomes is a strategy for
sustaining competitive advantage today; it will be
a turnaround strategy in the next few years, and a
survival strategy beyond that.
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46 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
Hardware at the edge is absolutely critical to this
capability and a competency that business leaders
must strive to attain, no matter the industry. From
now on, hardware will no longer be an afterthought—
it will be part of the DNA of every business.
This new capability in hardware will not only add
another layer of insights, but will also help businesses
better understand the context in which their
customers are operating. This combined bene?t will
empower managers to make decisions that directly
impact customer outcomes. Of course, one company
cannot do it all—the new leaders will be those that
can consistently collaborate with others to deliver
excellence across a spectrum of capabilities that
include hardware. Seventy-seven percent of our
Vision survey respondents are already strengthening
their digital businesses by taking part in open
innovation initiatives, using APIs to exchange data,
and leveraging technology platforms to deliver better
outcomes to partners and customers. The companies
that make those kinds of connections—literally and
?guratively—will outrun their rivals today and thrive
for a long time to come.
77
%
Are taking part in open
innovation initiatives, using
APIs to exchange data and
use technology platforms to
deliver better outcomes.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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In the next three months, focus on taking an
inventory of where your business stands, so you can
be more strategic over the longer term.
• Catalog the outcomes your customers are trying
to achieve and map those outcomes to current
product and service oferings.
• Take an inventory of hardware at the edge of your
network; chart the proximity of this hardware to
the customer outcomes cataloged earlier. Use the
intersection of these two mappings to highlight
opportunities to use hardware at the edge for new
feedback loops. Determine if any of these solutions
are repeatable across products and services.
• Evaluate existing product and service feedback
loops by drawing process diagrams for your top 10
oferings, taking careful note of how many steps
away from customer outcomes your furthest data
points are located.
• Identify which Internet of Things (IoT) consortia
might be ideal to accelerate the hardware
ambitions of your business and your ecosystem of
partners; reach out to some existing members to
discuss the bene?ts of participating.
• Build a competitive threat matrix that is focused
on nimble startups. Look at the way they use
intelligent technology at the edge to compete
for your customers. Use what you learn to either
inform your acquisition strategy or propose new
initiatives that will provide best-in-class insight on
how to help your customers achieve their goals.
• Identify opportunities to add sensors or other
hardware to existing products that will enhance
business insight on what customers are trying to
achieve. Evaluate options to transform product
companies into product-service hybrid companies,
with important data-based information services.
• Launch a company-wide innovation challenge to
solicit ideas from your workforce that will highlight
opportunities to migrate from products to services
and services to outcomes. Identify at least three
new business models to pilot.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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48 TREND 2: OUTCOME ECONOMY
By this time next year, be prepared to embark on a
hardware project, add sensors to existing solutions,
and have pilot projects that can demonstrate insights
gained from a closer relationship to customer outcomes.
• Model the impact of transitioning to outcome-
based revenue streams. Evaluate a roadmap and
pilot the transition of at least one ofering or suite
of oferings to outcome based.
• Evaluate your ability to deliver hardware
solutions at the edge and acquire or partner with
organizations to ?ll capability gaps.
• Appoint an outcome-driven innovation champion to
work with product managers to uncover ways products
can be re?ned to meet unmet customer needs.
• Pilot an outcome-based ofering with a close
customer and create feedback loops within its
business processes that provide near-real-time
insights on the outcomes your product is delivering
to their business.
• Look outside of your company for data sources
that will enhance your understanding of what your
customers are trying to achieve.
• Create a multiyear roadmap for integrating more
hardware and feedback loops with existing products
and services.
• Develop an ecosystem strategy that will allow you
to work with a portfolio of potential partners.
Evaluate if there are opportunities for disruptions
in your industry by moving up the value chain with
hardware-based outcomes.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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The Platform (R)evolution:
De?ning ecosystems,
rede?ning industries
Among the Global 2000, digital industry platforms and
ecosystems are fueling the next wave of breakthrough
innovation and disruptive growth. Increasingly, platform-
based companies are capturing more of the digital economy’s
opportunities for strong growth and pro?tability. Rapid
advances in cloud and mobility not only are eliminating the
technology and cost barriers associated with such platforms,
but also are opening up this new playing ?eld to enterprises
across industries and geographies. In short: platform-based
ecosystems are the new plane of competition.
TREND 3
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Ask a class full of children to draw “John Deere,”
and they will crayon big green tractors and diggers
with yellow wheels. Ask the proverbial man on the
street to describe the John Deere company, and he
will probably talk about the company’s farming
equipment and mention their signature green-
and-yellow tractors. But ask the company’s leaders
how they view Deere, and you will hear another
answer, and language, entirely. They will speak not
of products or brands, but of platforms for meeting
the current and future needs of all those who are
linked to the land…from farmers and ranchers
to landowners and bankers to retail grocers and
government workers…to that class full of children
and the average citizen-consumer.
We’re not referring to conventional equipment
platforms—this harvester, that tractor—but
to an industry technology platform that will
increasingly create new kinds of products, value,
and diferentiation for buyers and sellers across
the entire supply chain. In 2012, the MyJohnDeere
platform was launched to start a wholesale push
toward precision agriculture that would improve
productivity, efciency, and yield. Through this digital
industry platform, John Deere helps agricultural
producers consolidate the management of equipment
information, production data, and farm operations—
and ultimately improve the bottom line.
1
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Digital outpacing GNP: The growth of the digital
economy is outpacing GNP, and the disparity of those
capturing the growth and pro?tability continues
to widen.
Rise of platform-based companies: According to
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2013,
14 of the top 30 global brands by market
capitalization were platform-oriented companies.
2
Digital disruption: Since 2000, 52 percent of the
companies in the Fortune 500 have gone bankrupt,
have been acquired, or have ceased to exist, due in
large part to the disruption of traditional industry
models by digital models.
3
Cloud economics: Advances in cloud, mobile
platforms, and application development are
eliminating the technological and cost barriers
associated with digital industry platforms.
Everyone’s playing ?eld: There will be more than
100 new digital industry platforms from non-tech
companies as early as 2016, according to IDC.
4
Power of APIs: The technologies of application
programming interfaces (APIs)—the secret sauce of
the digital economy—are allowing companies to open
up their data and platforms for others to develop
applications on and to create value.
WHY NOW?
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John Deere is just one of the many companies that
are beginning to deploy a new weapon to grow their
business: the digital industry platform. Thirty-nine
percent of the executives we surveyed are using
industry platforms to integrate data and applications
with digital business partners and collaborate, while
35 percent are experimenting with industry platforms.
Underpinned by the latest wave of digital technologies—
social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and the Internet of
Things (IoT)—this platform is essentially a well-
de?ned technical architecture, ?rm governance, and
set of technology services all focused on enabling the
creation of new industry-speci?c applications. Like
MyJohnDeere, it’s designed to be the blueprint for
how companies will build, connect, and deliver
applications speci?c to industry problems. The
platforms serve as a pool of reusable functionality
and capabilities to make building and evolving these
applications fast and easy—and to help companies
ultimately achieve better business outcomes.
In the digital economy, these platforms also serve
as business model strategies that create competitive
diferentiation. The key characteristic of a platform-
based business is that others outside the company
are creating value for the enterprise—in many
cases enabling entirely new digital models for
the company. It’s true that over the last decade,
technology and Internet-born companies like Apple,
Facebook, and Salesforce.com have dominated the
headlines with their platform-based businesses. But
now, established non-tech industry enterprises are
moving quickly with major strategic initiatives to
become platform-based businesses.
In fact, the platform leaders of tomorrow will go
beyond the technology titans of today. By combining
the power of technology platforms with their
industry expertise, companies are developing new
business models and capabilities crucial to create
disruptive innovation, lead in key markets, and drive
growth. Inherent in these platform models is the
ecosystem they create and harness to deliver value.
39
%
Are using industry
platforms to integrate
data and applications with
digital business partners
and collaborate, while 35%
are experimenting with
industry platforms.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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John Deere’s platform, for example, supports an
ecosystem strategy that has enabled the company to
establish new digital partnerships with bio-chemistry
and agricultural hybridization leaders and to
expand its role in the digitally driven precision
agriculture market.
Building digital industry platforms and developing an
ecosystem strategy is a multiyear process. It’s not a
matter of “if,” but of “when” and “how.” Companies
large and small now see the digital industry platform
and the ecosystems that ?ow from them as the new
competitive mandate, whether they face established
players or digital newcomers.
Early movers like Philips, Home Depot, Kaiser
Permanente, Fiat, and John Deere are placing big bets
today. They understand that surviving and excelling
in the future depends not only on creating a digital
industry platform, but also on revolutionizing their
markets through platform-based ecosystems.
Welcome to the platform age
Digital business platforms mark the beginning of the
platform age. According to Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, “In 2013, 14 of the top 30 global
brands by market capitalization were platform-
oriented companies—companies that created and
now dominate arenas in which buyers, sellers, and
a variety of third parties are connected in real
time.”
5
While many businesses are using digital
initiatives to harness social, mobile, analytics, and
cloud technologies for competitive advantage and
disruption, far-sighted leaders are bringing together
their digital initiatives under platform umbrellas.
Today, it’s not enough to simply develop and deploy
digital tools. Companies must apply their industry
knowledge to build platforms that allow them to
rapidly innovate, develop, and deploy the products
and solutions needed to drive their digital business
strategies. This foundation will enable better
ways of operating, as well as create new kinds of
revenue streams.
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Looking back, this is not the ?rst time we’ve seen
platforms preempt waves of change. Platforms
involving new technologies, new processes, and
new relationships have historically driven major
disruption. Factories were the platforms that drove
the industrial revolution. Trains were the platforms
that revolutionized the transportation of goods and
people, enabling new ecosystems of communities
and commerce. And computer and communication
platforms have driven the information and
connectivity disruptions of the past 30 years.
Today, digital industry platforms are driving the next
major wave of technology and business change. But
why now? The elimination of barriers—in terms of the
technology, cost, and time associated with traditional
IT infrastructure and application development—
is the primary force driving and enabling this
change. According to Gartner, “the cost for service
providers to deliver infrastructure will plunge
almost 40 percent by 2017.”
6
Rapid advances in
digital technologies and the economic leveling that
they create are the major reasons why traditional
companies can now develop their own digital
industry platforms. These enabling technologies
include continuing developments in cloud services,
mobile platforms as front ends, rapid application
development, application programming interfaces
(APIs), and other advances.
While these digital technologies have disrupted
numerous established companies during the past 10
years, digital industry platforms will fuel the acceleration
of disruption during the next three to ?ve years,
leaving less and less time for established companies
to react to change. In case there’s any doubt about
the impermanence of the modern enterprise, since
2000, 52 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500
have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to
exist.
7
This is due in large part to the disruption of
traditional industry models by digital models.
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Digital technologies are coalescing into even more
powerful platforms, accelerating the pace of change,
and becoming the core foundation for the next
major wave of digital disruption across all industries.
According to research ?rm IDC, one-third of leaders
in virtually every industry will be disrupted by
competitors by 2018—newcomers and established—
that leverage platforms to innovate new oferings,
reach new customers, radically expand supply and
go-to-market networks, and disrupt their industries’
cost and pro?t models.
8
In addition, four out of ?ve
respondents (81 percent) in our survey believe that in
the future, industry boundaries will dramatically blur
as platforms reshape industries into interconnected
ecosystems.
Industry leaders with staying power are already
moving in this direction. GE, for example, has
formed a number of strategic relationships with
Amazon Web Services, Pivotal, Softbank, and
Cisco to accelerate the adoption of its GE Predix
software platform, which serves as the foundation
for connecting machines, people and analytics to
the Industrial Internet. Meanwhile, working with
Salesforce.com, Philips has launched HealthSuite
Digital Platform, an aggressive hospital-to-home
connected-care platform. On another front, home
improvement retailers are battling it out for the
do-it-yourself home automation market with a
variety of products and partnerships. Like many large
retailers, Home Depot and others are also looking to
engage with in-store customers through platforms
that are supporting apps, do-it-yourself project help,
and digitized product catalogs. These examples show
how platform leaders are rede?ning the ways that
products and services are created, sold, delivered,
and serviced.
4 out of 5
Believe that in the future,
industry boundaries will
dramatically blur as platforms
reshape industries into
interconnected ecosystems.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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The technology ingredients
needed for digital industry
platforms
If the digital industry platform is the pressing strategic
technology investment requirement for how companies
determine their future, then how does an enterprise
start building its own digital industry platform?
Most digital industry platforms will emerge on leading
public and hybrid cloud foundations: Microsoft’s
Azure, Amazon Web Services, Force.com, and many
others. Coupled with the maturity and economics of
these cloud services, APIs will become the secret
sauce for the rapid development of creative and
innovative apps and services that help form these
platforms. Put simply, APIs allow applications within
a company—and between a number of companies—
to share data and communicate. One-third of
organizations in our survey (35 percent) report they
are already using partner APIs, and an additional
38 percent are experimenting with them.
Seventy-one percent expect partner APIs to be
broadly adopted across their industries within the
next two years. Often described as “the API
Economy,” the rapid uptake of APIs has become the
glue behind the digital economy—and pro?ciency
with APIs is a core capability for a successful digital
business. Enterprises will also need competencies in
mobile platforms, open-source development, and
real-time computing environments. [See sidebar
Building Blocks of the Digital Industry Platform to
read more about the technology ingredients.]
Shifting the mindset
from “me” to “we”
As enterprises move to platform-based models, their
technology capabilities are rapidly changing—and so
are their ambitions. Innovative companies now view
platforms as a way to increase their capabilities to
attack bigger opportunities and to solve bigger problems.
71
%
Expect partner APIs to be
broadly adopted across
their industries within the
next two years.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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SIDEBAR
While a comprehensive technology blueprint
for platform building is beyond the scope of
Tech Vision, it’s useful to examine some of the
key technology building blocks.
Cloud services—the foundation
The majority of digital industry platforms will
run on leading software-as-a-service (SaaS)
and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology
foundations, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft
Azure, and Salesforce.com Saleforce1. In
the last few years, SaaS/PaaS providers have
matured very rapidly and can now support
market-level digital business initiatives,
including digital industry platforms. That’s
good news for non-tech companies that may
not be poised to develop their own technology
platforms from scratch.
API strategy and architecture—
the digital glue
Familiarity with and pro?ciency in APIs are
now core capabilities for any successful digital
business. While some non-tech executives may
be familiar with APIs, many are only just now
starting to grasp their signi?cance. Once just
a part of the developer’s toolkit, APIs are now
vital for digital industry platforms. Specialists
leading many of the API success stories include
Apigee and Intel’s Mashery.
There are, in fact, diferent types of APIs and
API business cases. For example, private APIs
expose data and functionality from legacy
systems and hybrid platforms for internal use
only to create ecosystems of internal developers
and business users. Although private APIs are
a good ?rst step for focusing expertise and
operational efciencies, they have limited
strategic impact. Thus, some enterprises will move
to partner API programs to deploy the multi-
stakeholder digital business initiatives in digital
industry platforms. Partner APIs are partially
open but still partner-controlled environments,
involving named and dedicated players.
Still other organizations will launch more
open and unrestricted public API programs to
attract the broadest range of digital business
partners, developers, and co-innovators for
the greatest potential returns. However, public
API programs require that enterprises have a
platform, architecture, and governance model
that not only can scale with unlimited API
use, but also can support a broad range of
developers and use cases.
Building Blocks of the Digital Industry Platform
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Open-source and reusable software—
the accelerator
Open-source development and reusable
software has typically driven innovation
and agility for application and product
development among large tech players and
startups. Now, large global enterprises are
getting in on the game as well. Open-source
code and software components are also key to
digital industry platforms, enabling platform
owners and ecosystem partners (developers,
customers, and alliance partners) to create and
share apps to deliver the greatest innovation,
quickly and cost-efectively.
Mobile development platforms—
the digital treasure chest
Mobile development platforms will be
signi?cant to digital industry platforms for
many types of enterprises. Today, iOS and
Android are the dominant mobile development
platforms for low-cost, rapid application
development and rich user experiences.
Companies will use public cloud services, open-
source software, and mobile development
platforms to unlock the treasure chest of
ready-to-assemble components and modules
that help create innovative apps and business
models. Critical to that efort, companies must
architect their technology stack and software
as modules and easy-to-use components to
attract developers. Thus, driving innovation
means truly eliminating complexity in the
platform to enable faster prototyping, testing,
and deployment of new apps.
Internet of Things—the catalyst for
real-time business models
In many cases, digital industry platforms will
be the hub for machine-to-machine (M2M)
and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, which
are already transforming how business works,
and will ultimately impact all industries. Industry
platforms of all kinds, but particularly M2M/
IoT-based initiatives, will increasingly require
real-time technical architectures to enable their
digital relationships. True strategic advantage
will come from having real-time capabilities
in place, so enterprises can attract and create
digital business opportunities and react quickly
to competitive threats. The rapid proliferation
of M2M/IoT will only increase this need for
scalable real-time environments and event-
based processing. Eighty percent of organizations
surveyed agree that companies will move toward
real-time platforms and systems as enterprises
adopt mobility and IoT solutions.
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Kaiser Permanente, for example, is taking on
complex healthcare challenges with a variety of
industry partnerships. Recognizing the critical need
to embrace collaboration to drive the next wave
of healthcare innovation, in 2013 Kaiser launched
Interchange, an API program embracing internal and
external software developers to build applications.
The company has also invested $4 billion (roughly
$444 per member) in building its HealthConnect
platform.
9
A foundational component of Kaiser’s
digital initiatives, the platform provides its clinicians
and nine million members with real-time access
to medical records. It also enables the company
to extend its traditional boundaries by engaging
with members through mobile applications, self-
management services, in-home monitoring, and
virtual consultations. Kaiser’s collaborative digital
initiatives improve the timeliness and quality of
patient care, while reducing operational costs and
optimizing clinicians’ time and expertise.
But platform strategies are not just for enterprises. In
China, the government is using a platform approach
to drive its smart city initiatives. With the population
of China swelling by eight million per year, the
government is turning to technology for help in
solving urgent issues, from trafc ?ow and public
transit to power grid management.
10
But to achieve these ambitious goals, enterprises and
governments both understand that they can’t go it
alone. In the digital era, enterprises are seeing that
their fortunes depend not only on their own
successful eforts, but also on the success of their
platform-driven ecosystems. China’s smart city
platform approach is enabling major providers like
Schneider Electric to address complex urban
transportation, building, and energy management
challenges in an integrated, scalable, and repeatable
platform approach.
11
Running on Microsoft Azure,
Schneider’s StruxureWare open-platform approach
includes an ecosystem of technology and integration
partners. With the “me” to “we” mindset, Schneider is
taking on one of the world’s biggest problems.
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According to a senior executive, “The energy dilemma
facing our world is massive, and our best hope for
solving it for future generations is through partnerships
with other like-minded, innovative companies.”
12
The big shift, however, is not about ?guring out
how to ?t into established ecosystems—it’s about
recognizing that companies in almost every industry
are already beginning the process of creating these
new digital ecosystems. Future success will depend on
the digital relationships that enterprises are creating
today. Sixty percent of the executives we surveyed
plan to engage new digital business partners within
their respective industries over the next two years,
40 percent plan to leverage digital business partners
outside their industry, and 48 percent plan to partner
with digital technology and cloud platform leaders.
In short, business and technology leaders must
master the shift from “me” to “we” in order to bring
these emerging digital ecosystems to life.
The ecosystem as an
innovation sandbox
These new digital ecosystems revolve around
innovation—creating entirely new ways to do business
and connect with partners and customers. It has
never been easy for large, established companies to
continuously innovate. Increasingly, leading companies
have begun to drive innovation in an unusual way:
letting others innovate for them. A majority of
organizations we surveyed (53 percent) indicate they
are now using an open innovation program to
innovate with customers, suppliers or partners. By
opening their platforms to external companies,
organizations can expand their open innovation
eforts even further by creating innovation sandboxes
in which their partners, alliances, startups, and even
consumers can experiment creatively and safely.
60
%
Plan to engage new digital
partners within their
respective industries over
the next two years.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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The results can be impressive. Facebook has unleashed
unprecedented growth and creative output—not to
mention competitive advantage—by allowing both
consumers and companies to innovate on the Facebook
platform. Initially, Facebook’s core business did not
include game development. So, in 2009 the company
engaged with Zynga to build an integrated gaming
experience on the Facebook platform. Zynga’s
FarmVille and CityVille games rapidly went viral. By
2011, 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue came from
Zynga.
13
Looking to follow a similar path to drive
innovation and positive outcomes for its customers,
Philips HealthSuite and GE are intending to open
their platform to companies in 2015.
But using an ecosystem sandbox approach does
more than boost innovation. It also helps to reduce
the risks of moving into uncharted territory by
externally shifting the risk to other enterprises and
third-party developers. Those companies that succeed
will drive further end-user adoption of the platform,
capturing their share of the business and economic
bene?ts. Take Apple’s app store, for example—its top-
grossing mobile game Clash of Clans is generating
well over $1 million a day.
14
Apple gets 30 percent
of the overall net sales.
15
Of course, not every Apple
app will be a huge win. But rarely, if ever, is the
company criticized for the hundreds of thousands
of iPhone apps that didn’t succeed. Apple is not
going to complain, because it never bore the risk of
developing those apps in the ?rst place.
Leveraging the network
multiplier efect
Beyond innovation and new ideas, the ecosystem
is also becoming a key way for companies to grow
faster. By understanding the network multiplier
efect of platform-driven ecosystems, companies can
digitally tap into the many networks of people who
are working toward the same goals. Then they can
leverage these networks to drive sustainable growth
in faster and economically smarter ways.
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In business, the network multiplier efect is about
a product or service becoming more valuable as
its adoption increases. Think telephones. With
only a handful of users to call, the product was
interesting, but not particularly valuable. But being
able to call billions of households all over the world
has revolutionized how people communicate and
do business. With platforms, the network efect
really starts with a company’s internal teams of IT
stakeholders—business units, operations, marketing/
sales, and R&D. Simply put, to get value out of a
platform, it has to be used. But unlike applications of
the past, it’s not just about getting one group to use
it. It’s about enabling and encouraging every group
in the company to adopt it as the best way forward.
Adoption by more users and diferent groups of users
will make the platform more valuable to all.
With ecosystems, enterprises are looking to use their
platforms as a base to create a multi-sided network
efect that generates value for many stakeholders
in a given market—with increased adoption, the
rewards are shared among various platform owners
and stakeholders. Digitally driven companies such as
Salesforce.com have been successfully leveraging the
multi-sided network efect for years. During the past
10 years, more than 100,000 companies have adopted
the Salesforce1 platform, sparking development of
220,000-plus apps. In short, Salesforce has leveraged
its platform-driven ecosystem to drive exponential
value creation and shared rewards for the company,
its customers, and its end users.
16
Apple, Google, and Amazon have long understood
and mastered the network multiplier efect of
ecosystems. The rapid adoption of their platforms
by very broad communities of developers and users
has spurred astonishing value creation and very
high pro?t margins. The economics of the network
multiplier efect have supported double-digit growth
and staggering market caps; rapid adoption and huge
scale have driven pro?tability without diminishing
returns. Leveraging its know-how and capabilities as
the largest online retailer, Amazon pioneered public
cloud services, one of the most transformational
technologies of the past decade. It now serves
hundreds of thousands of business customers.
17
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While Amazon is a dominant force in online
consumer retail, others are leading in enterprise
e-commerce—namely SAP’s Ariba Business Network
and China-based Alibaba. SAP’s Ariba is considered
the world’s largest business network with 1.6
million connected companies and $600 billion
in transactions ?owing through the exchange
annually—outpacing the likes of Amazon and eBay
combined on a transactional basis.
18
In fast pursuit,
fueled by a $25 billion initial public ofering—
the largest IPO ever—Alibaba’s marketplaces are
generating $248 billion on an annual transactional
basis.
19
In a business-to-business (B2B) procurement
world, cloud-based Ariba and Alibaba are leading
examples of the network multiplier efect that
allows trading partners to connect and collaborate
on a common open platform for products and an
expanding range of services—all to the bene?t of SAP
and Alibaba as their networks expand.
Today, the multi-sided network efect takes on
greater economic signi?cance for all kinds of
companies as digital industry platforms proliferate
and interconnect as ecosystems. As more companies
interconnect, more revenue will ?ow through
these ecosystems, providing new growth and
more opportunities for productive and pro?table
partnerships. The starting point for leveraging
the network multiplier efect, then, is to explore
ecosystem options in the digital economy.
Exploring the enterprise’s
role in the digital economy—
ecosystem choices
Once an enterprise sees itself as part of the digital
ecosystem, the next step is to determine its unique
value and role within it. Is it the primary ecosystem
leader and digital industry platform owner? Does
it play more of a secondary or shared role? Does
it connect to another organization’s ecosystem?
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Where and how does it connect its own ecosystem
with other platforms? What are the cross-industry
opportunities? What are the competing ecosystems?
First and foremost, every company will need
to decide whether to create its own platform
ecosystems, partner in the development of platform
ecosystems, or join one or more established
ecosystems. Accordingly, each company will need to
map out its environment, identify relationships and
interconnections to digital partners and developers,
and assess how the digital ecosystem competition is
emerging and evolving.
Platform ecosystems often start with a foundation
of traditional industry partners. Participating
enterprises begin to identify new digital relationships
within their markets—opening up their platforms
to third parties, for instance. That’s the path that
drugstore chain Walgreens chose for launching its
QuickPrints photo-processing API program in 2012,
while seeking to leverage its 8,200 locations and
photo-processing capabilities. Although the program
began with a traditional supplier—Hallmark Cards—
the QuickPrints initiative soon expanded to include
new digital partners and eventually became open
to any developer looking to integrate online photo
services into an app. Learning from its QuickPrints
pilot, Walgreens subsequently expanded its platform
business into a larger ecosystem with its Pharmacy
API program in 2013. The results are impressive:
customers who engage with Walgreens in the store,
online, and using their mobile phones spend six times
more than do store-only customers.
20
This approach
allowed Walgreens to learn through the lower-
risk QuickPrints program with established partner
Hallmark, and then expand to their more complex
Pharmacy API program.
Alternatively, an enterprise can leverage its platform
to engage with new digital partners and developer
communities within its own industry and across other
industries, creating entirely new business models
and forms of value for all ecosystem participants.
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For example, General Motors (GM) is making a broad
cross-industry ecosystem play with its “connected
car” platform. The company has evolved its OnStar
system from a standalone safety and concierge
service to a connected-car platform that includes
multiple partners and a wide range of innovators.
Its emerging connected car platform features real-
time diagnostics, safety/emergency, infotainment,
navigation, insurance modules, multiple third-party
apps, mobile connectivity, and so on. Recently, GM
teamed with AT&T to ofer drivers and passengers
access to 4G LTE network capabilities as part of
AT&T’s next-generation connected-car platform.
21
All
the established automakers are following GM’s lead
with connected car platforms that cross traditional
industry boundaries. Only newcomer Tesla Motors
originated as a platform business, with its software-
de?ned premium electric cars.
As if transcending industry boundaries weren’t
interesting enough, platform-based ecosystems
can have a truly universal impact. They give global
conglomerates the power to establish dominant
digital business positions—sometimes called over-
the-top (OTT) ecosystems. For example, GE has
outlined its vision for the “Industrial Internet”
where intelligent networks of machines operate
through multiple forms of software, sensors, data,
and analytics. To ful?ll this vision, GE launched its
Predix software platform, with very ambitious goals
to provide a common platform across GE businesses.
Employing more than 1,000 developers, designers
and engineers at its software headquarters in the
greater Silicon Valley, GE aims to “software-de?ne”
everything it makes, from trains and planes to
wind turbines and power plants. Its clear objective
is to extend the reach of the company’s vision
and ecosystem well beyond GE itself.
22
Although
GE launched 40 Predictivity solutions internally
and developed oferings powered by Predix, the
company is opening up the platform externally to
all companies.
23
A dominant force in many of its
markets, GE truly understands the value of opening
up its Predix platform and creating innovation with
an ecosystem.
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Conclusion
Digital business platforms are the new blueprint
for how companies will build, connect, and deliver
applications speci?c to industry problems and
opportunities. But platforms themselves are simply
the building blocks of a new concept for creating
value. Their development is evolutionary. Over time,
leading organizations will experiment with many
kinds of platform-centered initiatives, gradually
converging on the platforms that best ?t their needs.
It’s the broader shift toward platform-driven
ecosystems that will be revolutionary. More and more
leading companies already grasp the potential role
that ecosystems will play. They envision entirely new
realms of opportunity by leveraging their evolving
digital platforms in the context of powerful ecosystems
of partners. They know that in the digital era, their
fortunes depend not only on their own eforts and
successes, but also upon the successes of the
ecosystems their platforms can enrich and enable.
Platform-driven ecosystems are not a far-future
idea. The tools and techniques are coming together
today, and the data and sources of data are readily
accessible. What’s needed most is a widespread shift
in mindset toward platform-based ecosystems. The
leaders are making that shift now. An increasingly
urgent challenge for other global players: they must
quickly determine which platforms and ecosystems
will give their organizations a competitive advantage
and de?ne their roles in the digital economy.
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In 100 days, begin to develop a comprehensive
strategy that will lay out the foundation for your
digital industry platform and ecosystem.
• Appoint a champion to build a platform strategy
across your enterprise.
• Task business development and alliance
organizations to catalogue the digital platforms
being ofered by existing partners.
• Organize a governance body to be the gatekeepers
of digital inputs and outputs with external partners.
• Establish or recon?rm a top-down (Board and
C-level), enterprise-wide commitment to your
digital business strategy and industry blueprint.
• Based on your digital business strategy, begin
the design of your industry platform with three
core components: the business model, technical
architecture, and governance model.
• As a major foundational component of your
platform, create a cross-functional business and
technical team to develop your API strategy and
management approach.
• Identify potential digital partners and ecosystem
scenarios in three categories: existing business
partners becoming digital partners, new digital
partners within your industry, and new digital
partners outside your industry.
• Based on your digital business strategy and
potential partner scenarios, consider if you will
initially join, partner, or create your own platform
ecosystem.
• If you likely will build a platform, start identifying
technology partner options for public and hybrid
cloud services.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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By this time next year, start the transition from pilot to
production phases for internal and external programs.
• Execute a multiphase pilot program to launch your
platform and API programs internally and externally.
• Formalize technology partner and cloud services
relationships to support your platform environment.
• Extend internal platform and API developer
programs into a formal external developer program.
• Create and promote a digital sandbox for developers
to design and test apps built on the platform.
• Transition internal API programs into production,
while launching external API pilot programs for one
of your least complex oferings.
• Measure and report progress of the platform and
API programs using a range of business, ?nancial,
and technical metrics.
• Evangelize the initial round of apps and digital
partner solutions built on the pilot platform.
• Embrace opportunities for industry disruptions
by expanding partner strategies to move up the
value chain.
• Think big and broadly about the problems you
can attack and the opportunities you never
thought possible.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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Intelligent Enterprise:
Huge data, smarter
systems—better business
The next level of operational excellence and the next generation
of software services will both emerge from the latest gains in
software intelligence. Until now, increasingly capable software
has been geared to help employees make better and faster
decisions. But with an in?ux of big data—and advances in
processing power, data science, and cognitive technology—
software intelligence is helping machines to make even more,
better informed decisions. Business and technology leaders
must now view software intelligence not as a pilot or a one-
of project, but as an across-the-board functionality—one that
will drive new levels of evolution and discovery, propelling
innovation throughout the enterprise.
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For years now, business and technology leaders have
caught tantalizing glimpses of a new corporate
ideal—a powerful, productive, and exceptionally
intelligent organization whose competitive edge
comes from its pervasive use of data to drive
decisions. In this deeply data-driven model, a
marketing analyst uses big data to decide on an ad
placement, and a veteran executive leverages new
analytics tools to augment a growth strategy. The key
is that users can readily exploit actionable insights
from data to drive better business outcomes across
the enterprise.
At many companies, the quest for this Holy Grail
is under way. Their executive teams can cite the
studies showing that companies with a data-driven
culture are three times more likely to rate themselves
as substantially ahead of their peers in ?nancial
performance.
1
They understand that the usage of
analytics and adoption of a data-driven culture tend
to lead to business success.
2
Indeed, 60 percent of
global businesses believe that big data will improve
their decision-making and competitiveness.
3
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Rising digital complexity: 50 percent of CIOs state
that their chief concerns are solution complexity and
integration difculties.
4
According to 91 percent of
our survey respondents, software intelligence will be
critical to simplifying IT.
Unprecedented data volumes: IDC predicts that by
2020, there will be more than 40 zettabytes of data,
37 percent of which will be considered useful for
analysis (up from 22 percent in 2013).
5
Decreasing cost of storage: Counteracting the rapid
growth of data is the plummeting cost of storing it,
enabling companies to maintain vast data lakes that
can later be used to uncover analytical value. Over
the past 30 years, the cost per gigabyte of hard disk
data storage has halved every 14 months, from more
than $400,000 in 1980 to $0.05 in 2013.
6
Virtually unlimited compute power: Companies
can analyze big data at scale because they now have
access to incredible compute power, largely due to
the availability of cloud services. IDC reports state
that revenue from public cloud services grew at
double-digit rates to reach $45.7 billion in 2013 and
will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
of 23 percent through 2018.
7
Advances in data science: Improvements in deep-
learning and cognitive-computing technologies
are driving enterprise adoption. Advancements
in more human-like qualities, such as speech and
image recognition and reasoning capabilities, are
enabling companies to answer unclear and unde?ned
questions better and faster than ever before.
WHY NOW?
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However, the plain fact is that most enterprises are
struggling to fully utilize their data—they wrestle not
only with the volume of data now available to them,
but also with the many complexities of identifying,
capturing, categorizing, analyzing, and sharing it
throughout the data supply chain. Half of all chief
information ofcers concede that their biggest
concerns are solution complexity and integration
difculties.
8
Only 28 percent of businesses believe
that they are generating strategic value from the
data they collect, and nearly 40 percent admit that
they need a plan to take advantage of big data.
9
So, what will it take for businesses to achieve this
ideal—or at least get much closer to it?
The answer lies in realizing that more decisions are
being made by software—and that many more decisions
can and should be entrusted to machines. But as
software takes on more decision-making duties, it must
be made smarter, too. Only then can the enterprise
consider itself truly data driven and intelligent.
However, the opportunities do not end there. With
increased intelligence, software can also self-evolve
and make novel discoveries that drive entirely new
levels of innovation. Now, more than ever, businesses
must make a renewed investment in machines and
their digital intelligence—to propel data-driven
outcomes as well as opportunities for innovation.
This is the era of software intelligence, in which
applications and tools take on more human-like
intelligence. Sure, researchers have been working on
intelligent systems for years, but these technologies
have only recently become viable—the consequence
of today’s mix of vast amounts of data, cheap
storage, tremendously scalable computing, and
advanced data science.
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Just how is “software intelligence” de?ned? Isn’t all
software “intelligent” to some extent? At its most
basic, the term describes a class of technologies that
enables machines to make decisions—to turn on the
heat when the temperature drops below 70 degrees,
for example. The homeowner’s thermostat setting
becomes the software’s rule. Today’s more intelligent
thermostats “learn” the homeowner’s behavior,
essentially de?ning and evolving the rules themselves—
monitoring the homeowner’s schedule, say, and
automatically lowering the temperature from just
before she leaves in the morning until just before
she returns.
But software intelligence is now taking such
capabilities much further. Staying with our
thermostat example, the next generation of devices
will be able to “discover” useful connections that the
homeowner might not even be aware of herself; they
might learn, for instance, that 15 minutes after she
turns on the treadmill, she always turns of the heat,
and then take over that action for her.
These kinds of capabilities—to make decisions, to self-
evolve, and to discover—represent the foundational
aspects of software intelligence today. Tomorrow,
cognitive computing will take this to an even
greater level, extending a machine’s ability to sense,
comprehend, and act. With access to even more data
and cognitive reasoning capabilities, a machine could
perceive that its user is running a fever, understand
that she’s getting sick, and then turn up the heat—all
while diagnosing her illness and putting her in touch
with a healthcare provider.
Software intelligence must now be seen as a core
capability—one that not only can elevate operational
excellence throughout the organization, but also can
power innovation. Increasingly, decisions made solely
by software—whether they are to determine how
best to provide customer support or how to optimize
the supply chain—will determine the success or
failure of companies. Now, it’s up to business leaders
to ensure that the software is intelligent enough to
consistently make the right decisions.
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An unexpected catalyst for
more intelligent software
The catalysts for the software intelligence push
are not hard to ?nd. To be sure, there have been
decreases in data storage costs, increases in
processing power, and advances in data science. But
one notable driver comes from a place most may
not expect: the data itself. In recent years, there has
been an explosion of data—much of it due to the
proliferation of connected devices. Researchers report
that more data has been created in the last two years
than in all of human history, and market research
?rm IDC notes in 2014, the digital universe equaled
1.7 megabytes a minute for every person on Earth.
IDC predicts the total size of the digital universe
will reach 44 zettabytes of data in 2020. Roughly
10 percent of that data will come from 32 billion
connected devices—more than twice as many as there
are now.
10
Over the past year, respondents in our
survey indicate the volume of data managed by
their organizations grew steadily by an average of
55 percent.
The consequence: every company in every industry
now has access to astounding amounts of data
that allow software to increase its intelligence
signi?cantly. Machines are uniquely able to capitalize
on the scale of big data so that statistical algorithms
can improve their accuracy and discover entirely
new associations among the data—associations that
might not have been possible to hypothesize. Having
more data usually beats using a better algorithm, and
this enables big data to catapult the performance of
even relatively simple algorithms to new heights of
intelligence.
11
Consider language translation. For years, humans
have struggled to create accurate translation systems
in order to program the vast rules and logic of
language into machines. It’s not the words themselves
that are hard to translate—it’s the grammar and the
subtle, nuanced idiosyncrasies typical of most
languages that make it so challenging. Yet, engineers
are now making good headway.
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Google Translate has made leaps and bounds in what
is possible in language translation today, and it has
done so by exploiting big data—scouring hundreds of
millions of documents and billions of word sequences
to determine the best translations. By detecting
patterns in documents that have already been
translated by human translators, Google Translate can
make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate
translation should be. Google Translate can translate
text between 80 diferent languages and serves
200 million people daily, making it one of the best
tools available today.
12
Now imagine how the superabundance of data
can and will drive increasingly useful insights for
companies to make more informed business decisions
about their customers, products, competitors, and
markets. Consider Shazam, the music identi?cation
service, for example. Shazam impresses its many users
with its ability to “listen” to a song and scan countless
data sets to pinpoint the name of the song and the
artist in seconds. But the software intelligence behind
Shazam’s business model is driving much more than
foot-tapping rhythms. It is typically able to discover
hit songs 33 days before they reach the top of the
Billboard Hot 100. The “leading indicator” of this is
“app click” data—data that details how often users
try to identify a particular song playing around them.
The demand for these insights is so great that Shazam
is developing a “dashboard” feature for purchase.
13
By accessing that dashboard, other entities, such as
record labels and concert promoters, can increase
sales and better plan concert tours—efectively using
big data to drive big revenue.
A software intelligence
maturity curve
Software intelligence encompasses a wide range of
arti?cial intelligence technologies that ingest data to
trigger automatic action. These technologies range
from rule-based programming to machine learning,
deep learning, and cognitive computing. It also
includes specialty technology areas such as natural
language processing (NLP) for speech capabilities, as
well as computer vision for image recognition.
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This is just a small sample of terms from the wide
spectrum of software intelligence—terms that can be
highly technical, nuanced, and, frankly, misunderstood
by many. Hyperbolic coverage by the media of areas
such as deep learning has hindered as much as it has
helped; to the proverbial man in the street, the ?eld
of software intelligence is probably as murky as ever.
However, what is becoming clear to more and more
business and technology leaders is that companies
can use software intelligence to achieve real, tangible
business bene?ts.
From increasing worker productivity to improving
software functionality and discovering new
customers, intelligent software can be put to work
to tackle perennial business problems. It is an across-
the-board enabler of operational excellence and
innovative software services that is applicable across
many business functions.
Accenture envisions a way to make sense of these
new capabilities: a software intelligence maturity
curve that starts with automation, moves into
machine learning, and then extends to cognitive
computing. Each stage of this maturity curve merits
a closer look.
A foundation in automation
Enterprises understand that it is to their strategic
advantage to simplify and streamline many aspects
of their operations. Consider the complexity being
created by rising data volumes alone. In our Vision
survey, a majority of organizations (55 percent)
indicate the degree to which it is a challenge to
manage data at their organization is either very or
extremely challenging. Out of necessity, enterprises
are automating many of their tasks to keep up.
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For decades, rule-based algorithms have been the
norm to enable businesses to make more decisions,
faster. They help enterprises deal with their growing
data and IT systems by translating business logic
into programmable rules. These types of algorithms
automate basic processes—such as ?ltering unwanted
email into a spam folder or monitoring corporate
networks for problems—adding much-needed
horsepower to longstanding data challenges.
Rule-based programming continues to be used by
new applications that address modern technical
challenges. Just look at what is happening in today’s
data centers, which are becoming far larger and
more complex than ever in order to handle big
data. The setup, con?guration, and management
of these massive systems are so cumbersome that
open-source tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
and Salt are proving invaluable for automating and
simplifying the necessary IT infrastructure tasks.
14
To illustrate, Puppet Labs has helped cloud solutions
provider Morphlabs to perform any kind of system
con?guration in hours rather than days or weeks
by implementing its con?guration management
automation tool.
15
These types of solutions provide
the speed and scale necessary to realize and
capitalize on data insights throughout the enterprise.
A company’s ?rst foray into software intelligence
should be to identify tedious, time-consuming
tasks that follow consistent business processes
and to prioritize those as top candidates for rule-
based automation. London Heathrow Airport, for
instance, chose to automate its airport operations
and was able to implement the ?rst stage with the
Pegasystems’ Applications Platform in just nine weeks
with substantial bene?ts—including an increase in
on-time departures from 68 to 85 percent.
16
Rule-based automation is a powerful driver of
intelligence that many companies have yet to fully
embrace. Once they do, however, they will seek an
even better response to the increasingly dynamic
nature of today’s businesses—beyond hard-coded rules.
A new class of self-evolving applications promises to
fundamentally change software development.
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Software that learns
Much of the power of software intelligence comes
from its ability to self-evolve and make novel
discoveries. It enables software to stay up to date
without relying on manual updates, and it uncovers
opportunities to attract customers with new and
improved products and services, respectively.
Businesses that leverage massive amounts of data
to identify and de?ne associations—the foundations
of machine learning—will gain an edge over their
competitors.
Machine learning is not a single technology or
technique but rather a ?eld of computational
science that encompasses modern mathematics,
various statistical techniques including clustering
trees, probability theory, dynamic systems, and
deep learning, to name a few of its key areas. Data
scientists pull from all of these areas to determine
the set of algorithms—from Bayesian networks to
probabilistic trees, or an ensemble—that comprise
the best ?t for the use case. But what all of these
algorithms have in common is that they learn from
data and apply this knowledge to future situations.
In short, they acquire experience, which enables their
software to self-evolve and make discoveries for
innovation. Forty-one percent of those we surveyed
indicated they are using machine learning. Another
36 percent are experimenting with it and 16 percent
are considering using it.
IT groups are now under immense pressure to rapidly
produce software products and services and to keep
them up to date. DevOps has become the norm,
with teams deploying code up to 30 times more
frequently than before.
17
But quicker iterations of
smaller updates and never-ending project lifecycles
can’t go on forever. Machine learning provides the
answer, easing the load. By de?nition, it learns from
data to discover connections, so it has the distinct
advantage of evolving automatically with changes
in data—efectively enabling software to better keep
pace with the rising expectations of its users.
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Take Net?ix, the media streaming company
that revolutionized its industry by deploying a
sophisticated recommendation engine with machine
learning at its core.
18
With more than 30 million
subscribers, Net?ix relies on its algorithms to discover
connections between consumers’ prior activities
and the likelihood of their next viewing.
19
If a user
watches the gruesome action movies From Dusk Till
Dawn and 300, for example, Net?ix can learn from
these unique data points to recommend a speci?c
category of movies: Visually Striking Violent Action
& Adventure. By using this approach, machines
make intelligent decisions to provide personalized
recommendations for every user—ultimately driving
about 75 percent of viewer activity.
20
Businesses in other industries are making similar
moves. In the energy sector, an oil and gas
production company has deployed machine learning
to add real-time situational awareness to its facility-
management system. By continuously reviewing tens
of thousands of data streams on operating conditions
along the company’s pipelines, the software learns
what normal behavior looks like. It then evolves
by itself to ?ag unexpected patterns within the
data, raising alerts in real-time about unexpected
situations before they become critical events. This
makes the pipeline operations safer and more
pro?table, too.
21
Properly utilized, machine learning can add even
more value. Not only can it self-evolve, but it can
discover entirely new associations—ones that almost
certainly could not have been made by humans
alone. Typically, these unprecedented connections are
highly predictive in nature, empowering enterprises
to acquire the insights that enable them to adapt—
and thus develop new products and enter new
markets before their competitors do.
The predictive intelligence engine 6Sense uses
machine learning to improve sales efectiveness in
business-to-business scenarios. Fueled by volumes of
data and powered by advanced analytics, 6Sense’s
software helps sales and marketing teams discover
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new prospects, identify the best ways to reach
them, and predict their propensity to buy with up to
80 percent accuracy—efectively enabling companies
to market to customers they don’t yet have.
22
Not only does this constitute a new take on lead
discovery, but it also gives users the foresight to
adapt to future customers’ interests and needs.
For many companies, machine learning may be a
daunting challenge, but now is the time to start
investing—to educate talented employees, hire
technical experts, and implement the necessary
technologies. Forward-looking companies will
identify their data assets, leverage new ones, and
start to explore the data they already have in search
of hidden insights. They will start small and add
on until machine learning is pervasive throughout
the enterprise.
Scaling intelligence through
cognitive computing
The last stage of the maturity curve of software
intelligence is cognitive computing. It is the
culmination of rule-based, machine-learning, and
other advanced technologies used to achieve the
highest levels of contextual software intelligence
at scale. Cognitive computing software can sense,
comprehend, and act. In other words, it enables
computers to perceive the world, analyze and
understand the information collected, and make
informed decisions to take action.
With the ability to utilize much more data and
acquire many more insights for greater contextual
understanding, cognitive computing systems
can start to solve problems that are particularly
ambiguous, unclear, and unde?ned—problems which,
thus far, have been left solely to the formidable
cognitive capabilities of humans.
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Often, there may not be a “right” answer to these
types of questions; but by exploiting its unique
reasoning capabilities, cognitive computing software
can help determine the “best” answer. This unique
approach opens the doors to solving entirely new
problems and challenges facing businesses every day—
to further drive intelligence throughout the enterprise.
Some recent advances in cognitive computing come
from improvements in deep learning—a multilayer
approach to machine learning inspired by biological
neural networks. Notably, many of these deep-learning
successes have also come through unsupervised-
learning methods—again, another sub-category of
machine learning—where unlabeled data, without
tags or other metadata, is used. Both deep-learning
and unsupervised-learning methods have signi?cantly
pushed the boundaries of NLP for speech recognition
and propelled the capabilities of computer vision for
image recognition—both of which are critical to
achieving a more human-like interface.
IBM has made one of the largest investments in
cognitive computing today, putting $1 billion
toward its Watson Group early in 2014. Defeating
two champions of the TV game show Jeopardy! in
2011 was just the beginning; Watson is now taking
on pertinent vertical industry challenges, with an
emphasis on the healthcare industry. According to
IBM chief executive Virginia Rometty, Watson has the
potential to “change the face of healthcare”—helping
doctors deliver better, more personalized care in
situations that may not be well de?ned or clear.
23
The
ultimate goal is for Watson to continue to deepen its
knowledge and expand its breadth of expertise—to
achieve the Holy Grail of software intelligence.
Amelia, IPsoft’s virtual agent, is another example
of the cognitive computing software in use today.
“She” can be deployed quickly, using an instruction
manual for a call center representative, say. But
the software’s strengths lie in its ability to learn
from experience, understand context, and provide
a “human touch.” The impact that Amelia has on
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businesses is immediate and substantial—so much
so that IPsoft guarantees a 30 percent increase in IT
efciency in 90 days.
24
It’s easy to extrapolate: Amelia
could provide ?nancial trading support or become an
expert advisor for ?eld engineers in remote locations,
for instance.
While cognitive computing technologies may be
out of reach for many companies today, far-sighted
business and technology leaders will begin to elevate
the software intelligence of their organizations by
raising expectations for their current solutions and
then building in communication capabilities, such as
NLP or image recognition. They will start by focusing
on small, better-de?ned use cases and then gradually
broaden their scope—while simultaneously providing
more data to increase their systems’ contextual
understanding—to tackle more ambiguous questions
and daunting challenges.
Caution and collaboration
Of course, the power and potential of software
intelligence do not come without some risks. An
over-reliance on data—regardless of how smart the
underlying algorithms used to process it are—can
result in narrow interpretations that inhibit rather
than enable innovation. Consider Street Bump, a
smartphone app used in Boston, Massachusetts,
to collect data on potholes using a phone’s
accelerometer and GPS and submitting the data
to the city to initiate repairs. While the concept
was great, the problem was its scope: because
smartphone owners tended to have higher incomes, a
majority of the potholes being reported were in more
afuent sections of town—which was an inaccurate
representation of the needs across the city.
25
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The good news is that companies can work around—
and perhaps even overcome—these limitations
by building new levels of collaboration between
humans and computers. Machines can compute
with exceptional precision and scale, and will get
better and better at doing so. But humans excel at
thinking creatively and in context, such that they can
question and improve the conclusions of intelligent
software. According to 78 percent of our survey
respondents, successful businesses will manage
employees alongside intelligent machines—ensuring
collaboration between the two. Leading companies
will ensure increased collaboration between their
employees and machines in a new blended workforce.
[See Workforce Reimagined to read more about how
businesses should reimagine the new people-plus-
machine workforce.]
The power of pervasive
intelligence
Used wisely and carefully, the power of software
intelligence can give companies the operational
excellence and innovative edge they need—because
machines have the speed and scale, and now the
intelligence, to make decisions that will have a real
impact on the business. Companies will start by
automating many of the tedious manual processes
that inhibit agility as they pursue the data-driven
enterprise. And once achieved, they will realize
it is just the beginning—the truly intelligent
enterprise will unlock many more opportunities.
Machine-learning technologies will pave the way
for intelligent software to evolve itself to keep
pace with technology. They will also make novel
discoveries that enable companies to adapt to the
ever-changing digital world. Cognitive computing
will go one step further to capitalize on its unique
reasoning capabilities to address questions that were
once unanswerable due to their ambiguity and lack
of clarity.
78
%
Believe successful
businesses will manage
employees alongside
intelligent machines—
ensuring collaboration
between the two.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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Put simply, businesses that harness the power
and potential of software intelligence will run
more efciently, innovate more rapidly, and serve
customers more efectively. Visionary companies
will ?nd new ways to get smart software out of the
lab and into as many practical scenarios as possible,
thereby spurring innovation and raising the bar of
operating performance across their organizations.
Software intelligence is a game-changer for every
business in every industry. Ignoring that fact is,
simply, not very smart.
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Over the next three months, develop a comprehensive
understanding of software intelligence, including
how it is currently used and could best be used in
your company.
• Identify the software intelligence currently in use
by your company to provide a capabilities and gap
analysis. Understand the advantages that software
intelligence provides, from making decisions
to self-evolution and discovering opportunities
for innovation.
• Take an inventory of labor-intensive business
processes and identify appropriate opportunities
to invest in automation and machine-learning
capabilities that can help to improve operational
capabilities and scale analytics.
• Identify speci?c applications that require frequent
and manual updates, data extracts, and/or a
high degree of personalization. If the application
relies on data, classify it as a top candidate for
software intelligence, such as machine learning
for self-evolution.
• Map these examples/use cases against your current
business processes and corporate strategy to
prioritize speci?c opportunities—to catch up or
gain new advantages.
• Cultivate your data science talent—develop a
plan to build, buy, and/or partner to support
your machine-learning and advanced-analytics
know-how.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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A year from now, begin to permeate software
intelligence throughout your enterprise—by proving
rule-based automation capabilities, implementing new
machine-learning technologies, and understanding
the latest cognitive computing trends.
• Review your top candidates for software
intelligence as determined in the 100-day plan.
Implement an automation technology that
addresses one of these use cases. Quantify its
business impact and use those cost savings to
justify the next project(s).
• Develop machine learning skills by implementing
a machine-learning software solution that utilizes
a de?ned data set for a very speci?c use case
and bene?ts from advanced analytics, such as a
personalization application.
• Pilot a machine-learning solution that discovers
new data associations. Review the outcomes with
an eye toward identifying new opportunities for
growth and innovation, such as a new customer
segment or creating a new product.
• Review your machine-learning use cases with a
questioning eye. Set up a quality assurance process
to support or refute the conclusions being drawn
and subsequent actions taken. Have your data
scientists con?rm that the datasets are complete
and accurate and that the algorithms are appropriate.
• Create a training program to ensure that your
data scientists are educated on the latest deep-
learning and cognitive-computing technologies,
speci?cally in natural language processing and
image recognition. Give them time to research
and develop potential solutions with these new
technologies.
• Establish a top-down strategic commitment to
software intelligence and data science, including
R&D investment, innovation programs, and
production development.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
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Workforce Reimagined:
Collaboration at the
intersection of humans
and machines
The push to go digital is amplifying the need for humans
and machines to do more, together. Advances in natural
interfaces, wearable devices, and smart machines will present
new opportunities for companies to empower their workers
through technology. This will also surface new challenges
in managing a collaborative workforce composed of both
people and machines. Successful businesses will recognize
the bene?ts of human talent and intelligent technology
working side by side in collaboration—and they will embrace
them both as critical members of the reimagined workforce.
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Say hello to technology, the newest employee in your
workforce. It’s smarter than ever and quick, too, but
technology still needs training and teammates; it can’t
work alone—nor should it. According to 77 percent
of the executives we surveyed, within three years,
companies will need to focus on training their machines
as much as they do on training their people (e.g., using
intelligent software, algorithms, and machine learning).
When people and machines work together, they have
the potential to produce better outputs than either
could separately. Businesses must recognize that
technology is no longer just a set of tools—it is now
a partner in a new collaborative workforce.
In fact, collaborative technology is already making
everyday lives easier. Consider the semi-autonomous
cars from manufacturers like Audi, In?niti, Mercedes-
Benz, General Motors, and Toyota. Each has
announced self-driving navigation features that
will enhance their cars and assist drivers, making
their experiences better, easier, and safer all around.
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Maturing technology: Advances in natural language
processing (NLP) are making it much easier for
humans to interact naturally with technology and
machines. NLP is expected to grow rapidly to a
$10 billion market by 2018.
1
Advances in wearable
computing are allowing workers to integrate more
technology seamlessly into their work?ows.
Human-like interactions: Baidu chief scientist
Andrew Ng predicts that voice and image searches on
Baidu will surpass text queries within ?ve years—an
indication of growing expectations for more human-
like interactions with intelligent software.
2
Fast ROI: Gartner predicts that “by 2018, the total
cost of ownership for business operations will be
30 percent lower than today because of the wider
use of smart machines and industrialized services.”
3
Improved efciency: Gartner forecasts that in 2017,
savings in the ?eld service industry will increase
$1 billion due to smartglasses.
4
Important use cases such as worker safety:
Most of the resources that are easily accessible from
the earth (oil & gas, minerals, energy) have been
extracted. Resource companies are sending humans
to more and more dangerous missions in more
and more remote regions of the Earth. The need
for robots to work together with humans in such
situations is becoming more pronounced.
WHY NOW?
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If navigating in heavy urban trafc, for instance,
Mercedes-Benz S-Class drivers in Europe can press
a button on the car’s steering wheel to activate
Intelligent Drive, enabling the system to temporarily
take over braking, steering, and acceleration up to
37 miles per hour.
5
Of course, this feature doesn’t
ofer anything new that a human driver can’t
already do, but it takes advantage of the machine’s
unique capabilities to avoid becoming fatigued
or distracted—thus increasing vehicle safety while
easing the burden of driving in trafc.
But in the enterprise, human and machine
collaboration goes beyond just eliminating fatigue
or making experiences more pleasant—it provides
organizations with the opportunity to tackle even
greater challenges. For example, the US space agency
NASA is teaming astronauts and robots together to
face the difcult and dangerous task of cleaning up
derelict satellites. Out?tted with advanced analytics
algorithms and stereoscopic cameras, robot spheres
are analyzing space junk to quickly map each piece’s
spin, velocity, trajectory, and center of mass—
allowing astronauts to capture it safely.
6
These examples demonstrate just how efective
people and machines can be when they work
together—and more and more companies are
realizing this every day. It is now possible to use
advances in speech recognition, natural language
processing, wearable technology, and machines to
access the power of intelligent software throughout
the decision-making process [see The Intelligent
Enterprise], enabling humans to leverage technology
to produce better business outputs. The companies
that are successfully embracing the reimagined
workforce—in which people and machines efectively
work as a collaborative team—are obtaining a
competitive edge in this new digital world.
Look again at the scenarios from NASA and
Mercedes-Benz. Most focus on the advanced
software and robotics that drive these machines to
act intelligently on their own. However, of equal
note are the advancements in how people interact
with technology.
77
%
Believe that within the next
three years, companies will
need to focus equally on
training their people and
their machines.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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In the journalism ?eld, for instance, reporters at the
Los Angeles Times are now working with intelligent
software to write articles. QuakeBot is one such
program that writes ?rst drafts of reports when an
earthquake hits.
7
It extracts earthquake data from a
United States Geological Survey report and plugs it
into a pre-written template. From there, the article
is turned over to a human editor who veri?es that
the information is correct, makes any edits, and
immediately publishes it. In addition to making
the reporting process much easier for the writer,
this teamwork greatly improves the speed between
earthquake occurrence and article publication. In one
instance, QuakeBot enabled an article to be posted
within three minutes—making the Los Angeles Times
the ?rst media outlet to report on the earthquake.
8
The next generation of businesses will be composed
of people and technology working side by side to
achieve better results and tackle bigger challenges.
To best embrace this shift, companies will have to
train their employees to collaborate efectively with
technology—and, in some cases, teach and guide
the technology as if it were an apprentice. Smart
machines now have the ability to interact with, train,
and learn from humans, and this enables them to
perform better over time. By creating a positive cycle
of collaboration between humans and machines,
enterprises can drastically improve the outputs
of both and embrace the digital age with a
reimagined workforce.
The augmented workforce
The development of more natural interfaces for
interacting with technology is making it more
acceptable to turn to machines for assistance today.
But it doesn’t have to be a robot that augments your
workforce efciency. By bringing the digital into
the physical world, even wearables are transforming
people into “better versions” of themselves.
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And it doesn’t stop there. Humans are using
machines to take on more challenging physical tasks
while achieving greater operational efciency. These
new capabilities are allowing companies to create
new experiences where humans and machines are
accomplishing more together than either could
have on their own. The result? Companies are
providing capabilities that enable their employees
to collaborate productively with technology, and
technology is starting to act as a real member of
the workforce.
Newer and more natural interfaces
It seems straightforward, but you can’t work with
machines if you can’t communicate with them. The
developments in how people interface with machines
are a driving force behind the new wave of human-
computer collaboration seen in the enterprise.
Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and
speech recognition are making it much easier for
humans to interact naturally with technology and
machines—and companies are starting to recognize
this value. The market for NLP is expected to grow
from $3.8 billion in 2013 to $9.9 billion in 2018, a
compounded annual growth rate of 21.1 percent over
that period.
9
Voice searches on mobile phones that use Apple’s
Siri or Google Now are increasing in popularity.
That’s because speech recognition is more reliable
than ever. By making unstructured conversations,
written or spoken, searchable in real-time, NLP is
acting as the enabler behind speech recognition.
Additionally, as users grant these mobile intelligent
assistants access to contextual data, they receive
more relevant suggestions. Take Google Now, which
makes inferences based upon voice and written
searches and con?rmation messages sent to Gmail.
By analyzing contextual clues and incorporating
user feedback—for relevancy and accuracy—tools like
Google Now learn what is useful and, for example,
notify users of ?ight times for itineraries found in
email. Immediate user feedback not only enables
Google Now to evolve as an improved assistant, but
also grants Google the ability to act as a trusted
mobile advisor to every user.
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Expect Labs’ MindMeld is another application
using NLP with the potential to change how huge
segments of the workforce operate. The “anticipatory
computing” app listens to voice conversations and
surfaces relevant information for its users in real-
time. Expect Labs has already released the MindMeld
API to the public, enabling other apps to build in
this functionality.
10
Consider the advantage this
could create for customer service agents: MindMeld
technology could provide support by suggesting
efective responses for the agent, even as a customer
is still explaining the issue. Not only does this
human-machine collaboration enhance the customer
experience, a pain point for many, but it can also
reduce call time, make the agent more efective,
and improve overall efciency for the call center
by allowing the customer service agent to focus on
activities only humans can do.
The power of wearables
But the interfaces between people and machines
are evolving in many more ways than just how both
sides communicate. Physical enhancements provided
by smart devices are helping to bridge the digital
and physical worlds. Wearable technology is now
collecting more data via sensors, communicating
more information via displays, and truly augmenting
a person’s physical capabilities. Leveraging wearable
devices that augment action allows companies to
equip their employees with the technology they
need to do better work, while improving operational
efciency and safety.
Physical sensors are being built into wearable systems
to collect information on their surroundings—which
can potentially save lives in hazardous situations.
Forty percent of organizations in our survey are
considering using sensors to augment their workforce
for this intelligence gathering purpose. For instance,
Accenture’s Life Safety Solution out?ts workers in
oil and gas re?neries or chemical plants with a lapel-
based wireless four-gas detector, in addition to a
40
%
Are considering using sensors
to gather intelligence and
equip their workforce with
more insights.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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panic button and a motion sensor.
11
By continuously
monitoring the environment, companies can mitigate
risks and improve worker safety. In a similar vein,
Caterpillar’s telematics solutions use video analytics
to detect when heavy machinery operators are
drowsy.
12
In both cases, these sensors are monitoring
employees and their environments in order to alert
them to unsafe conditions.
Wearable technology can provide further value
by displaying critical information in unobtrusive
ways. To illustrate, last year Accenture and Philips
demonstrated how a doctor wearing Google Glass in
an operating room could use the display to monitor
a patient’s vital signs while performing surgical
procedures, all without turning away from the
patient.
13
And surgeons at Indiana University Health
Methodist Hospital have used Google Glass assistance
during the removal of abdominal tumors.
14
Surgeons
were able to look directly at their patients and keep
their hands on critical tasks, all while maintaining a
constant view of vital patient data as well. In these
cases, augmented devices have provided doctors
with additional degrees of freedom, portability, and
unprecedented contextual information. Taking this
one step further, some hospitals are making plans
to improve training by using cameras to stream and
record live surgeries, as seen through the eyes—and
smart glasses—of a surgeon.
Companies may also opt to use wearable technology
in order to magnify a person’s physical capabilities
and increase worker productivity. In fact, the US
military is already in advanced tests with so-called
exoskeletons—robotic frameworks that people wear
to augment their own physical strength. To assist
with the construction and maintenance of its ships,
the US Navy purchased two Lockheed exoskeletons—
intelligent machines that can support heavy assembly
machinery and handle loads of up to 36 pounds.
Early tests show that the exoskeleton has increased
productivity from two to 27 times, depending on the
task.
15
Now, these adaptable machines are reaching
manufacturing ?oors, as well, optimizing company
savings on production costs.
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Human and machine, side by side
As the ?eld of robotics continues to advance,
more machines are becoming capable of not just
communicating and augmenting human employees,
but also physically working side by side with them.
Many enterprises have learned that, while machines
excel at precision, scale, and consistency, humans are
better suited for creativity, contextual understanding,
and complex communications. Now, companies can
have a division of labor that caters to the strengths
of each—and appropriately distributes tasks to
maximize the impact of both.
Already, there are many compelling examples
of humans and machines working together to
boost process productivity. Close to one-third of
organizations in our survey are considering robotics
to automate business and industrial processes. In an
auto manufacturing trial, a human-robot team was
able to assemble the frame of a car 10 times faster
than a team of three professionals. How? For simple
welds, a robot with a video projector would show a
human where to place a speci?c part; then the robot
would make perfect welds in ?ve seconds per weld.
For more difcult welds, however, the robot would
defer to its human partner to perform better.
16
By specializing tasks, process improvements are just
the beginning of how enterprises will improve their
workforce. Machine learning means managers can
now entrust robots with whole work?ows, not just
simple tasks. Amazon’s Kiva robots, working alongside
warehouse employees, not only improve operational
efciency as they retrieve items, but also enable
dynamic warehouse operations. These robots can
reduce the average time it takes to grab an item from
a shelf to 15 minutes, down from an hour and a half,
and their dynamic and adaptive algorithms suggest
inventory sorting.
17
For example, they know that
certain seldom-ordered products are better stored in
a more remote area.
1 out of 3
Are considering using
robotics to automate
business and industrial
processes.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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These advances in technology mean that humans
now have the opportunity to multiply their efciency.
A blended human and machine workforce is giving
companies the ability to automate tasks, improve
processes, and contribute to a positive feedback
loop—driving increased intelligence, performance,
and productivity across the enterprise.
Building your new workforce
From newer and more natural user interfaces to
smarter physical devices and machines, improvements
in intelligent technology are enabling teams of
humans and machines to collaborate more easily and
efectively than ever before—and empowering them
to do more together than they ever could alone.
Just what will it take to realize the full potential of
humans and machines working together? Companies
must prioritize the training of the blended workforce,
helping their human talent grow the skills needed to
complement machine capabilities.
Furthermore, companies must start making
technology more approachable and usable to a
broader set of employees. Gartner predicts that
“by 2018, the total cost of ownership for business
operations will be 30 percent lower than today
because of the wider use of smart machines and
industrialized services across the enterprise.”
18
Training
Advances in technology are empowering people
to learn in new ways—and technology is getting
smarter, too, thanks to human feedback. Together,
these improvements result in greater employee
engagement.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are gaining
traction as a legitimate way to receive quality
training. Ninety percent of our survey respondents
report they expect to use MOOCs within the next
three years as a way to better train their workforce.
90
%
Expect to use MOOCs
within the next three years
as a way to better train
their workforce.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey
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Coursera’s Signature Track program, for instance,
is enabling companies such as Yahoo to develop
their own signature training programs, which can
be completed remotely and at a person’s own pace.
Researchers at Stanford University are using MOOCs
to realize big gains in efciency. By incorporating
machine learning techniques into their Machine
Learning MOOCs, they are able to provide near-
real-time feedback to approximately 25 percent of
students in a 100,000-student course. To do this, the
university only needs about half of the efort that
would normally go into providing feedback for code
submissions provided by a traditional group of
400 students.
19
But in a workforce of humans and machines, it’s
not just people that need training to keep their
skills up to date. Enterprises also have to invest in
their machines to ensure that employee–technology
collaboration is optimized.
In experiments at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), researchers have shown that
an industrial robot can be trained by essentially
observing and adapting to the habits of an individual
worker. In this speci?c manufacturing experiment,
humans inserted objects into prepared drill holes in
whatever sequence they preferred. Robots then made
the workers more efcient by observing and then
predicting their sequence of object placement, and
then ?lling holes with glue just before the workers
inserted objects into the holes.
20
Errors, such as glue
drying before an object was inserted, were reduced
without having to change or adapt the humans’
work styles.
Advances in robotics technology mean that training
some machines, such as Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, is
as simple as moving their robotic limbs so that they
can learn what to do.
21
Over time, that may lead to
real-time collaborative learning by both the human
and the machine as they learn to optimize the
completion of predictable tasks.
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Democratization of skills
Another way to improve interactions between people
and machines is to “democratize” technology—
?nd ways to categorize and shift skill sets so
that employees can approach tasks that were
previously reserved for specialists. For example,
new developments in higher-level programming
languages, such as Apple’s Swift and Google’s Go,
are making it easier for business users to create their
own applications. While software development used
to require speci?c coding skills, syntax knowledge,
and architecture topologies, today’s more accessible
programming languages require far fewer specialized
development skills—putting them within reach of
non-IT professionals.
Similarly, drag-and-drop visual interfaces make it
easier for tasks such as data prep to be simpli?ed by
software. Trifacta is one such company that supports
agile data exploration, essentially bringing visual
analysis to everyone. Now, non-IT employees can
make insightful decisions with less intense data prep
and fewer analytical skills. By developing people
with greater learning agility, companies can shift the
emphasis away from speci?c expertise in favor of
industry knowledge.
Immersive wearable displays are also helping to
level up skills and improve employee engagement.
In Japan, Mitsubishi Electric is experimenting with
software from the augmented reality software
company Metaio on Epson’s Moverio smart glasses
to assist air conditioner technicians on their service
calls. The glasses let the technicians view three-
dimensional overlays on the physical objects they’re
repairing so that they can see how to remove or
replace parts.
22
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Volkswagen has also created a display system for
its XL1 hybrid, which makes it easier for mechanics
to quickly repair the vehicle’s complex power train
design. Using a tablet that shows an on-screen
digital overlay, mechanics can review the context-
dependent steps that they must take.
23
This reduces
repair times, supports rapid and complex product
design changes, and enables dynamic learning—
technicians no longer have to pause to refer to
a service manual or call the home ofce for
additional instruction.
Better workforce,
better business
This reimagined workforce—one that will enable more
work to be done better—will raise many new issues
as well. Which jobs should be assigned to humans
and which to humans working with machines?
What governance systems are in place to help us
decide? How do we deliberately and strategically
decentralize decision-making so that machines can
carry more of the load—sometimes literally? How
can the human workforce be trained for this new
blended work environment? How do we rethink the
skills for hiring human talent—should we emphasize
more or less specialized knowledge? Researchers are
continuing to probe into these kinds of questions.
For business and IT leaders, however, the biggest
question may be how to recognize and then respond
to the fact that business processes—indeed, the entire
value chain of business operations—are starting to shift
from a labor-driven and technology-enabled paradigm
to a digital-driven and human-enabled model.
24
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Leading companies are already beginning to voice
these kinds of questions. They are starting to think
about the combinations of intelligent technology
and training that can enable and optimize human-
machine eforts, accomplishing more than either
could on their own. They are looking anew at core
business activities to identify those tasks that can
be better suited to involving machines. And they are
beginning to give thought to what type of people
they should be hiring in the future.
Human and machine, each on its own, won’t be
enough to drive business in the decades to come.
Tomorrow’s leading enterprises will be those that
reimagine their workforce and efectively blend
humans and technology as partners. Get ready for
your new digital workforce.
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Take 100 days to learn about the variety of options
that contribute to the reimagined workforce. Decide
how you can harness them moving forward.
• Appoint a cross-functional team to uncover
opportunities for integrating technology to
augment your workforce’s operational efciency
and workplace safety—include members from the
human resources, business, and technology areas.
• Identify what competitors and companies in other
industries are doing in blended workforces. Based
on the benchmark results, prioritize the range of
opportunities, timelines, and risk-return criteria.
• Establish criteria to identify use cases for
investment in further human-machine
collaboration. Based on your company’s criteria,
?nd the segment with the most practitioners in
your company and identify which tasks rely more
on precision, scale, and consistency versus creativity
and contextual decision-making.
• Take a close look at positions that remain open.
Pilot ?lling these positions with new methods of
people and machine interaction.
• Ensure an understanding of where your workforce
needs augmentation technologies, and perform a
gap analysis on the skills that will be required of
future employees.
• Evaluate if technology can be used to address
some of the worker safety issues in remote and
challenging environments.
• Test scenarios where wearable computing
technologies improve the seamless integration of
workers and business processes.
• Pilot the use of new training technology to deliver
more options for a distributed workforce—consider
massive open online course (MOOC) certi?cation
programs, virtualized training, and job swapping.
YOUR 100-DAY PLAN
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By this time next year, your business should have an
understanding of the types of workplace tasks that
employees can let machines complete. Begin building
a blended workforce in stages.
• Pilot prioritized solutions by dividing and
distributing tasks that play to your workforce’s
strengths: machines for precision, scale, and
consistency and humans for creativity, contextual
decisions, and complex communication.
• Determine industry-relevant opportunities for
leveraging technology to help your human
workforce focus on tasks that are more complex.
• Create employee-training programs that are
sensitive to the new skills required for your
blended workforce.
• Integrate technology where specially trained
workers were previously required. Use the
augmentation technologies to make those jobs
available to less skilled workers.
• Evaluate and apply technologies to address some of
the worker safety issues in remote and challenging
environments.
YOUR 1-YEAR PLAN
TREND 5: WORKFORCE REI MAGI NED 103
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Stretching the Boundaries
of the Digital Business
CONCLUSION
Two years ago, the Accenture Technology Vision
signaled that “Every business was becoming a digital
business.” We forecasted worldwide transformation
in the role of technology and in the business models
required for success, detailing what it would take
for every business to re-imagine itself in this new
digital era.
Last year, we pushed that thinking further. Our report
declared that “Big is the Next Big Thing”—meaning
that large and often long-established companies
were starting to use technology as a driving force
for how they grow. We predicted that these new
“digerati,” with their deep resources, huge scale, and
process discipline, were about to rewrite much of the
digital playbook.
One year on, Global 2000 companies have been
transforming along this very path. There is John Deere,
founded in 1837, and today a true digital trailblazer.
There is consumer electronics titan Samsung, now
moving into very diferent digital realms. The list of
digital giants gets longer by the day.
But what’s signi?cant is that non-IT companies are
placing themselves in the driver’s seat. They are not
waiting for the next wave of technology to wash
over them. There is no technology standard that must
crystallize before they can act. They are not watching
to see what Google or Facebook or Box or Pinterest is
doing—they are making their big moves proactively.
#t echvi s i on2015
104 CONCLUSI ON
And what’s new about those moves is that they
are not directed internally—toward improvements
in their current operations and business processes.
Instead, these enterprises are stretching their
boundaries to leverage a broader ecosystem of digital
businesses as they shape the next generation of their
products, services, and business models.
As such, the digital movers are thinking big thoughts,
asking big questions: how do we sell insurance in an
age of driverless cars? Are we selling services, such
as an electrical supply, or outcomes, such as warmth
and comfort? Are we making and selling televisions
or creating hubs for smart homes? How can we help
bring about tomorrow’s smart mega-cities? What can
we do to solve the world’s looming food shortages?
Leading companies are no longer thinking only
about using technology to transform themselves
into a digital business. They are thinking about how
to combine their industry expertise with the power
of digital technology to reshape their markets and
de?ne their new role in a “We Economy.”
Make no mistake, this “We Economy” will require a
much diferent approach to building applications—
one that is liquid, intelligent, and connected. Future
applications need to be more nimble. Companies
that begin their reinvention now will bene?t from
applications that can adapt to the pace of business,
manage rising complexity and open doors to more
interconnected business environments. This new
approach is described in the Accenture Future of
Applications Point of View.
The questions for leaders of traditional businesses
are now these: how will your organization exercise
its digital advantage? What will your company do
to grow and expand to take on greater challenges?
And ultimately—what will our future be, together as
enterprises in the “We Economy?”
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
CONCLUSI ON 105
About the Technology Vision
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
#t echvi s i on2015
106 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Every year, the Technology Vision team collaborates
with Accenture Research to pinpoint the emerging
IT developments that will have the greatest impact
on companies, government agencies, and other
organizations in the next three to ?ve years.
The research process this year began with gathering
inputs from the Technology Vision External Advisory
Board, a group comprising of more than two dozen
executives and entrepreneurs from the public and
private sectors, academia, venture capital, and
startup companies. In addition, the Technology
Vision team conducted nearly 100 interviews
with technology luminaries, industry experts, and
Accenture business leaders.
The team also tapped into the vast pool of
knowledge and innovative ideas from professionals
across Accenture, using Accenture’s collaboration
technologies and a crowdsourcing approach to
launch and run an online contest to uncover the
most interesting emerging technology themes. Over
1,700 participants actively engaged in the contest,
contributing valuable ideas and voting on others’
inputs.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 107
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
In parallel, Accenture Research conducted a global
survey of 2,000 business and IT executives across nine
countries and 10 industries to capture insights into
the adoption of emerging technologies. The survey
identi?ed key issues and priorities for technology
adoption and investment. Respondents include
mostly C-level executives and directors. Functional
and line of business leads were also included.
Respondent company revenues were $500 million and
over with the majority of companies over $6 billion.
As a shortlist of themes emerged from the research
process, the Technology Vision team hosted a series
of deep-dive sessions with Accenture leadership
and external subject-matter experts, validating and
further re?ning the themes. Once a set of trends
emerged that appeared to be complete, the External
Advisory Board was reconvened to validate the
selection of trends and add insight from their own
spheres of in?uence.
The screens used during these processes weighed the
themes for their relevance to “real world” business
challenges. Speci?cally, the Technology Vision team
sought ideas that transcend the well-known drivers
of technological change, concentrating instead on
the themes that will soon start to appear on the
C-level agendas of most enterprises. Each theme met
the following criteria:
• Actionable today
• Highly relevant to an organization’s transformation
within three years
• Having signi?cant impact beyond any one
industry “silo”
• Disruptive beyond a straightforward “one for one”
replacement for an existing solution
• Transcending any one vendor or discrete “product”
technology
This process resulted in the ?ve overarching themes
presented in this year’s report.
#t echvi s i on2015
108 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Revenue
(USD)
6-9.9
billion
1-5.9
billion
+50
billion
500-999
million
20-49.9
billion
10-19.9
billion
Auto
Banking
Communications
Healthcare
Industrial
Equipment
Insurance
Life Sciences
Public Service
Retail
Utilities
Title
Director, IT 24%
15%
13%
13%
9%
9%
7%
6%
4%
Function Head
CIO or Chief Mobility Ofcer
CTO or Director of Technology
CMO
Line of Business Head
COO
CFO
CSO
Headquarters
Locations 10%
190 184 167 171 199
10% 10% 10% 10%
Headquarters
Locations 10%
143 185 298 451
10% 15% 15%
Australia Brazil China France
India South Africa United Kingdom United States
Germany
Industry
220
243
230
101
221 221
208
162
234
160
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015 SURVEY DEMOGRAPHICS
As a new input into this year’s
Technology Vision, we conducted a
global survey of 2,000 business and
IT executives across nine countries in
order to understand their perspectives
on key technology challenges they face,
and identify their priority investments
over the next few years. This survey
was ?elded from December 2014
through January 2015.
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 109
END NOTES
Trend 1: The Internet of Me
1
“Smart Light Bulb Saves Energy as It Learns,”
Engineering.com, September 14, 2014.http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/
ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/8489/Smart-
Light-Bulb-Saves-Energy-as-It-Learns.aspx.
“10 Things You Did Not Know You Can Do With
Philips Hue and IFTTT,” Smart Bulb Reviews,
February 2, 2014.http://smartbulbreviews.com/10-
things-you-did-not-know-you-can-do-with-
philips-hue-and-ifttt/.
2
“What is an Adaptive Transmission?” Cars.com,
September 19, 2013.http://ask.cars.com/2013/09/
what-is-an-adaptive-transmission.html.
3
“Meet Levi’s Stadium, the Most High-Tech Sports
Venue Yet,” Time, August 18, 2014.http://time.com/3136272/levis-stadium-
tech/#3136272/levis-stadium-tech/.
4
“Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2015 and
Beyond: Digital Business is Driving ‘Big Change,”
Gartner, October 4, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/document/2864817?ref=s
hareSummary.
5
“The Internet of Things: The Future of Consumer
Adoption,” Acquity Group, 2014.http://www.acquitygroup.com/docs/default-source/
Whitepapers/acquitygroup-2014iotstudyfca32e344
0236f7b9704f000083d49c.pdf?sfvrsn=2.
6
“The Nest Developer Program is Here,” Nest,
June 23, 2014.https://nest.com/blog/2014/06/23/
the-nest-developer-program-is-here/.
7
“Whirlpool Corporation Announces Product
Integration with Nest,” Whirlpool press release,
June 24, 2014.http://investors.whirlpoolcorp.
com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=856250. (Note:
Energy-saving feature is ofered via Nest’s Rush
Hour Rewards program)
8
“Ralph Lauren Introduces iPhone-connected ‘Polo
Tech’ Fitness Tracking Shirt,” 9 to 5 Mac Apple
Intelligence, August 26, 2014.http://9to5mac.
com/2014/08/26/ralph-lauren-introduces-iphone-
connected-polo-tech-?tness-tracking-shirt/.
9
“Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2015 and
Beyond: Digital Business is Driving ‘Big Change,”
Gartner, October 4, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/document/2864817?ref=s
hareSummary.
10
“Smartphone Users Check Facebook 14 Times a
Day,” Mashable, March 27, 2013.http://mashable.com/2013/03/27/facebook-usage-
survey/.
11
“Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2014 Results,”
Facebook, October 28, 2014.http://investor.fb.com/
releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=878726.
12
“The Internet of Things: The Future of Consumer
Adoption,” Acquity Group, 2014.http://www.acquitygroup.com/docs/default-source/
Whitepapers/acquitygroup-2014iotstudyfca32e344
0236f7b9704f000083d49c.pdf?sfvrsn=2.
#t echvi s i on2015
110 NOTES
13
“The Future of the Connected Car,” AT&T,
January 6, 2014.http://about.att.com/newsroom/
connected_car.html.
14
“Coca-Cola Amatil Boosts Sales With Interactive
Vending Machines,” FoodBev.com, May 6, 2014.http://www.foodbev.com/news/coca-cola-amatil-
boosts-sales-with-inter#.VCm4_hYfBSk.
15
“PayGo to Support Georgia Power Prepay
Initiative,” PayGo press release, January 21, 2014.http://home.paygoelectric.com/paygo-to-support-
georgia-power-prepay-initiative/.
16
“Customer Desires vs. Retailer Capabilities:
Minding the Omni-Channel Commerce Gap,”
Forrester Consulting report commissioned by
Accenture and hybris software, January 20, 2014.http://www.accenture.com/
SiteCollectionDocuments/Accenture-Customer-
Desires-VS-Retailer-Capabilities.pdf.
17
PhysIQ website:http://www.physiq.com.
18
“Macy’s, Inc. Outlines New Developments in
Omnichannel Strategy and Technology,” Macy’s
press release, September 15, 2014.http://www.businesswire.com/news/
home/20140915005587/en/Macy’s-Outlines-
Developments-Omnichannel-Strategy-
Technology#.VBc5R0sR4jJ.
19
“Connected Car App Automatic Gets Even
Smarter With IFTTT Integration,” TechCrunch,
February 26, 2014.http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/connected-
car-app-automatic-gets-even-smarter-with-ifttt-
integration/.
20
IFTTT website:https://ifttt.com/recipes.
21
“Pandora Wants to DJ the ‘Internet of Things’
(Q&A),” CNET, July 5, 2014.http://www.cnet.com/news/pandora-wants-to-dj-
the-internet-of-things-q-a/.
22
“Following Rumors That the FuelBand is Dead,
Nike CEO Admits the Company Will Focus on
Software,” Business Insider, April 25, 2014.http://www.businessinsider.com/nike-ceo-admits-
that-the-company-will-focus-on-software-2014-4.
23
“The Four Keys to Digital Trust,” Accenture,
September 9, 2014.http://www.accenture.com/
SiteCollectionDocuments/communications/
accenture-four-keys-digital-trust.pdf.
24
“Anything Apple Can Do...Google’s Android L
Software Will Be Encrypted by Default—Just Like
iOS 8,” Daily MailOnline UK, September 19, 2014.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/
article-2762150/Anything-Apple-Google-s-Android-
L-software-encrypted-default-just-like-iOS-8.html.
25
“Why OKCupid’s ‘Experiments’ Were Worse Than
Facebook’s,” Hufngton Post, August 6, 2014.http://www.hufngtonpost.com/joseph-farrell/
why-okcupids-experiments-_b_5655217.html.
26
“Lookout Open Sourced Its “Private Parts,” You
Should, Too,” Lookout, March 12, 2014.https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2014/03/12/open-
source-privacy-policy/.
NOTES 111
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Trend 2: The Outcome Economy
1
“Comedy Club Charges per Laugh with Facial
Recognition,” BBC News, October 9, 2014.http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29551380.
2
ExpressPark Demand Based Pricing results are based
on “LA Express Park: Demand-Based Pricing—How is it
Working?” from the ITSA Smart Parking Symposium,
March 18, 2013.http://vimeo.com/64186728.
3
“The M2M Adoption Barometer 2014,” Vodafone,
July 2, 2014.https://m2m.vodafone.com/cs/m2m/
insight_news/2014-07-02-the-m2m-adoption-
barometer-2014.
4
Ibid.
5
“The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis,” Cisco,
June 10, 2014.http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/
solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-
networking-index-vni/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_
WP.html.
6
Anthony W. Ulwick, “Turn Customer Input into
Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002.
7
Climate Corporation website:http://www.climate.com/.
8
“The Mission of Tesla,” Tesla blog by Elon Musk,
November 18, 2013.http://www.teslamotors.com/
blog/mission-tesla.
9
Interview with Yashar Behzad, Director of Product
Development and Data Science at Proteus Digital
Health, July 30, 2014.
10
“Your Nest Protect Just Got a Whole Lot
Smarter,” Gizmoto, September 4, 2014.http://gizmodo.com/your-nest-protect-just-got-a-
whole-lot-smarter-1630455315.
11
“MEMS Market Tracker—Consumer and Mobile—
H2 2013,” IHS, March 4, 2014.https://technology.ihs.com/426078/.
12
“Internet Trends 2014,” KPCB, May 28, 2014.http://kpcb.com/internet-trends.
13
Broadcom website:http://www.broadcom.com/
products/wiced/sense/.
14
“Specs That See Right Through You,” New Scientist,
July 5, 2011.http://www.newscientist.com/article/
mg21128191.600-specs-that-see-right-through-
you.html.
15
Interview with Ben Waber, Co-Founder, President
and CEO of Sociometric Solutions, August 18, 2014.
16
Gigaom conference in SF, Tuesday, October 21st,
presentation by Phil Bosua, CEO of LIFX.
17
Accenture analysis.
18
“How Much Venture Capital are Kickstarter and
Indiegogo Hardware Projects Raising?” CB Insights,
August 11, 2014.http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/
crowdfunded-venture-capital-hardware/.
19
Wink website:http://www.winkapp.com/faq.
“Wink, Home Depot Aim to ‘Take Confusion Out’
of Home Automation,” CEPro, July 1, 2014.http://www.cepro.com/article/wink_home_
depot_aim_to_take_confusion_out_of_home_
automation_starting_today/.
20
“Musk Solar Strategy Used as Model for Record
Investments,” Bloomberg, September 15, 2014.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-15/
musk-solar-strategy-used-as-model-for-record-
investments.html.
21
“Facebook: Open Compute Has Saved Us $1.2
Billion,” Data Center Knowledge, January 28, 2014.http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/
archives/2014/01/28/facebook-open-compute-
saved-us-1-2-billion/.
#t echvi s i on2015
112 NOTES
Trend 3: The Platform (R)evolution
1
“John Deere Launches MyJohnDeere Web Portal
as Customer Resource,” John Deere press release,
June 29, 2012.http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/
en_US/corporate/our_company/news_and_media/
press_releases/2012/agriculture/2012jun29_
myjohndeere.page.
2
“The Ups and Downs of Dynamic Pricing,”
Innovation@Work blog, October 31, 2014.http://executive.mit.edu/blog/the-ups-and-downs-
of-dynamic-pricing#.VG4yA_nF-bU.
3
“Constellation’s 2014 Outlook on Dominating
Digital Business Disruption,” Constellation
Research, February 10, 2014.https://www.constellationr.com/content/research-
summary-sneak-peeks-constellations-futurist-
framework-and-2014-outlook-digital.
4
“Directions 2014 Tokyo: Key Battles and
Strategies for Dominance on the 3rd Platform,”
IDC, June 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=J14990272.
5
“The Ups and Downs of Dynamic Pricing,”
Innovation@Work blog, October 31, 2014.http://executive.mit.edu/blog/the-ups-and-downs-
of-dynamic-pricing#.VG4yA_nF-bU.
6
“Gartner Forecasts IT Spending Growth and
Trends,” Gartner, November 10, 2014.http://gartnernews.com/gartner-forecasts-it-
spending-growth-and-trends/.
7
“Constellation’s 2014 Outlook on Dominating
Digital Business Disruption,” Constellation
Research, February 10, 2014.https://www.constellationr.com/content/research-
summary-sneak-peeks-constellations-futurist-
framework-and-2014-outlook-digital.
8
“IDC Predictions 2015: Accelerating Innovation—
and Growth—on the 3rd Platform,” IDC,
December 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=252700.
9
“How Kaiser Bet $4 Billion on Electronic Health
Records—and Won,” InfoWorld, May 2, 2013.http://www.infoworld.com/article/2614353/ehr/
how-kaiser-bet--4-billion-on-electronic-health-
records----and-won.html.
10
Worldometers website:http://www.worldometers.
info/world-population/china-population/.
11
“Bright Ideas for Cities of Light,” China Daily,
October 29, 2012.http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/
business/2012-10/29/content_15854498.htm.
12
“Schneider Electric Boosts Partner Programs for
EcoStruxure,” Data Center Knowledge, June 7, 2013.
13
“Zynga Makes Up 12% of Facebook’s 2011
Revenue,” Forbes, February 1, 2012.
14
“Top Grossing iOS Mobile Gaming Apps as of
October 2014, Ranked by Daily Revenue (in U.S.
Dollars),” Statista, October 2014.http://www.statista.com/statistics/263988/top-
grossing-mobile-ios-gaming-apps-ranked-by-
daily-revenue/.
15
Apple website:https://developer.apple.com/
programs/ios/distribute.html.
16
Salesforce.com website:http://www.salesforce.
com/au/platform/what/.
17
Amazon.com website:http://aws.amazon.com/
about-aws/global-infrastructure/.
18
Ariba website:http://www.ariba.com/solutions/
the-ariba-network.
19
“What is Alibaba?” WSJ.com, 2014.http://projects.wsj.com/alibaba/.
20
http://apigee.com/about/press-releases.
NOTES 113
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
21
“General Motors Selects AT&T’s 4G LTE Network
to Deliver Enhanced Services to Millions of
Vehicles,” AT&T press release, February 25, 2013.http://www.brslabs.com/industries/energy/.
22
GE website:https://www.gesoftware.com/about.
23
“Minds + Machines Roundup: One Platform,
40 Predictivity Solutions, and Predix for All,” GE
Software, October 9, 2014.
https:\www.gesoftware.com\blog\minds-machines-
roundup-one-platform-40-predictivity-solutions-
and-predix-all.
Trend 4: Intelligent Enterprise
1
“Fostering a Data-Driven Culture,” Economist
Intelligent Unit and Tableau, 2013.http://www.tableausoftware.com/economist-
fostering-data-driven-culture.
2
“Analytics, Data-Driven Culture Bring Business
Success: Survey,” eWeek.com, September 27, 2012.http://www.eweek.com/it-management/analytics-
data-driven-culture-bring-business-success-
survey/?mchk=1.
3
“Data Driven Leaders Can Create a Big Data
Payof.” Business News Daily, September 30, 2014.http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7218-data-
driven-leadership.html.
4
“The CMO–CIO Disconnect Bridging the Gap to
Seize the Digital Opportunity,” Accenture, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/
PDF/Accenture-2040-CMO-CIO.pdf.
5
“EMC Digital Universe Study,” with data and
analysis by IDC, April 2014.http://www.emc.com/
leadership/digital-universe/index.htm.
6
“Average Cost of Hard Drive Storage,” Statistic
Brain, November 11, 2014.http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-cost-of-
hard-drive-storage/.
7
“Public Cloud Services Spending Is Being Driven
by Enterprise Applications Solutions, According to
IDC,” IDC press release, July 7, 2014.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.
jsp?containerId=prUS24977214.
8
“The CMO–CIO Disconnect. Bridging the Gap to
Seize the Digital Opportunity”, Accenture, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/
PDF/Accenture-2040-CMO-CIO.pdf.
9
“Data Driven Leaders Can Create a Big Data
Payof,” Business News Daily, September 30, 2014.http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7218-data-
driven-leadership.html.
10
“EMC Digital Universe Study,” with data and
analysis by IDC, April 2014.http://www.emc.com/
leadership/digital-universe/index.htm.
11
“Why More Data and Simple Algorithms Beat
Complex Analytics,” DataInformed, August 7, 2013.http://data-informed.com/why-more-data-and-
simple-algorithms-beat-complex-analytics-models/.
#t echvi s i on2015
114 NOTES
12
“Google Translate—Find Out How Our
Translations Are Created,” Google, 2014.http://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/.
“Big Data is the New Arti?cial Intelligence,”
Betanews.com, April 16, 2014.http://betanews.com/2014/04/16/big-data-is-the-
new-arti?cial-intelligence/.
“Google Translate Now Serves 200 Million People
Daily,” CNET, May 18, 2013.http://www.cnet.com/
news/google-translate-now-serves-200-million-
people-daily/.
13
“Shazam Predicts 2013 Chart Toppers,” Billboard,
November 30, 2012.http://www.billboard.com/
biz/articles/news/1082833/shazam-predicts-2013-
chart-toppers.
“Can Shazam Predict the Next Big Hit? Industry
Insiders Look to Song Identi?cation App as New
Measure of Success” Rollingstone.com, February 20,
2014.http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/
can-shazam-predict-the-next-big-hit-20140220.
14
“Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt,”
InfoWorld, November 21, 2013.http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609482/data-
center/review--puppet-vs--chef-vs--ansible-vs--
salt.html.
15
“MorphLabs uses Puppet for Con?guration
Management Automation and to Quickly Deliver
Custom Cloud Services,” Puppet Labs, July 2010.http://puppetlabs.com/sites/default/?les/wp-content/
uploads/2010/07/CaseStudy_MorphLabs_0.pdf.
16
“Pega Customers: Heathrow,” Pega website.http://www.pega.com/customers/heathrow.
17
“Why Do DevOps?”, New Relic website.http://newrelic.com/devops/bene?ts-of-devops.
18
“Machine Learning and Recommender Systems
@ Net?ix Scale—Qcon International Software
Development Conference 2013”, Xavier Amatriain,
Research/Engineering Manager at Net?ix,
November 2013.http://www.slideshare.net/xamat/
qcon-sf-2013-machine-learning-recommender-
systems-net?ix-scale.
19
“Big Data at Net?ix Drives Business Decisions,”
InfoQ, December 12, 2013.http://www.infoq.com/
news/2013/12/net?ix-bigdata-decisions.
20
“The Science Behind the Net?ix Algorithms That
Decide What You’ll Watch Next,” Wired, August 7,
2013.http://www.wired.com/2013/08/qq_net?ix-
algorithm/.
21
“Case Study: Midstream Gas Pipeline,” BRS Labs,
2014.http://www.brslabs.com/?les/pdf/Case_
Study_SCADA.pdf.
22
6Sense website:http://6sense.com/.
23
“IBM Unveils Plans for Watson Supercomputer,”
CNN Money, January 9, 2014.http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/09/technology/
enterprise/ibm-watson/.
24
“Transforming Tomorrow. Delivering Today. A
Selection of Stories from Organizations Adopting
IPsoft’s Innovative Autonomic Solutions to Deliver
Guaranteed Business Outcomes”, IPsoft, June 2014.http://www.ipsoft.com/wp-content/
uploads/2014/06/Case_Study_Selection1.pdf.
25
City of Boston Street Bump Mobile App:http://www.cityofboston.gov/doit/apps/streetbump.asp.
“Confronting the Data Dilemma,” Elizabeth Good
Christopherson, Rita Allen Foundation, July 25, 2013.http://www.ritaallenfoundation.org/blogs/
confronting-data-dilemma.php.
NOTES 115
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VI SI ON 2015
Trend 5: Workforce Reimagined
1
“Natural Language Processing (NLP) Market worth
$9,858.4 Million by 2018,” Markets and Markets,
October 2013.http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/
natural-language-processing-nlp.asp.
2
“Baidu Builds Largest Computer Brain for Online
Queries,” Bloomberg, September 4, 2014.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-04/
baidu-builds-largest-computer-brain-for-online-
queries.html.
3
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/
newsroom/id/2866617.
4
Ibid.
5
“Mercedes-Benz’s Autonomous Driving
Features Dominate the Industry—and Will for
Years,” Automotive News, August 4, 2014.http://www.autonews.com/article/20140804/
OEM06/308049979/mercedes-benzs-autonomous-
driving-features-dominate-the-industry.
6
“Using Cameras and Fancy Algorithms to Track
Spinning Space Junk,’ Wired, September 11, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/09/algorithm-
spinning-space-junk/.
7
“How an LA Times Reporter Got an Algorithm to
Write Articles for Him,” Business Insider, March 17,
2014.http://www.businessinsider.com/quakebot-
robot-la-times-2014-3.
8
“Rise of Robot Reporters: When Software Writes
the News,” New Scientist, March 21, 2014.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25273-rise-
of-robot-reporters-when-software-writes-the-
news.html#.VHuaEzHF_1Y.
9
“Natural Language Processing (NLP) Market
worth $9,858.4 Million by 2018,” Natural Language
Processing (NLP) Market [IVR, OCR, Pattern
Recognition, Auto Coding, Text Analytics, Speech
Analytics, Machine Translation, Information
Extraction, Question Answer, Report Generation]—
Worldwide Market Forecast & Analysis (2013–2018),”
MarketsandMarkets, October 2013.http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/
natural-language-processing-nlp.asp.
10
“More AI for developers as Expect Labs releases
the MindMeld API,” Gigaom, February 19, 2014.https://gigaom.com/2014/02/19/more-ai-for-
developers-as-expect-labs-releases-the-mindmeld-api/.
11
“Accenture Life Safety Solution Named New
Product of the Year,” Accenture press release,
October 23, 2012.http://newsroom.accenture.com/
news/accenture-life-safety-solution-named-new-
product-of-the-year.htm.
12
“New Technology from Seeing Machines Ofered
in Caterpillar Mining Trucks to Combat Driver
Fatigue,” M2M Evolution, May 29, 2013.http://www.m2mevolution.com/topics/m2mevolution/
articles/339753-new-technology-from-seeing-
machines-ofered-caterpillar-mining.htm.
13
“Accenture and Philips Collaborate on Google
Glass Proof-of-Concept in the Medical Equipment
Technology Industry,” Accenture, October 3, 2013.http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/service-
google-glass-medical-equipment-technology-
industry.aspx.
14
“Google Glass Helped to Enhance the Way that a
Surgeon Can Perform Various Procedures,” Mobile
Commerce Press, February 21, 2014.http://www.mobilecommercepress.com/
augmented-reality-wearable-technology-assists-
cancer-surgery/8510991/.
15
“Navy’s Exoskeleton Could Make Workers 20
Times More Productive,” Wired, September 10, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/09/navys-exoskeleton-
could-make-workers-20-times-more-productive/.
#t echvi s i on2015
116 NOTES
16
“The Future of Computer Intelligence Is
Everything but Arti?cial,” Wired, June 11, 2014.http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-future-of-
computer-intelligence-is-everything-but-arti?cial/.
17
“Meet Amazon’s Busiest Employee—the Kiva
Robot,” CNET, November 30, 2014.http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-amazons-busiest-
employee-the-kiva-robot/.
18
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner press release, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2866617.
19
Jonathan Huang, “Data Driven Student Feedback
for Programming Intensive MOOCs,” Stanford
Computer Forum, April 16, 2014.https://forum.stanford.edu/events/2014/2014jonat
hanhuanginfo.php.
20
“Robotic Assistants May Adapt to Humans
in the Factory,” MIT News, June 12, 2012.http://newsofce.mit.edu/2012/robot-
manufacturing-0612.
21
“Increasingly, Robots of All Sizes Are Human
Workmates,” MIT Technology Review, April 23, 2014.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/526691/
increasingly-robots-of-all-sizes-are-human-
workmates/.
22
“Augmented Reality gets to Work,” MIT
Technology Review, February 24, 2014.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524626/
augmented-reality-gets-to-work/.
23
“Volkswagen XL1 Gets an Augmented Reality
Service App,” Mashable, October 5, 2013.http://mashable.com/2013/10/05/volkswagen-
augmented-reality/.
24
“Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT
Organizations and Users for 2015 and Beyond,”
Gartner press release, October 7, 2014.http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2866617.
NOTES 117
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