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Three surprising
digital bets for 2015
Look beyond the obvious investments
and raise your company’s Digital IQ
with enterprise wearables, NoSQL
databases, and business sensors
January 2015
Which technologies are companies investing in this year? Business and IT leaders in our
2015 Digital IQ Survey preview say cybersecurity (69%), private cloud (61%), and data
mining and analysis (54%). These top-three bets are important technologies that many
businesses need—but they may not distinguish you from the competition.
Instead, look to a trio of picks we believe have extraordinary potential, despite being
off the radar screen of many businesses. In fact, wearables (3%) and NoSQL databases
(6%) placed at the very bottom of the priority list for survey respondents, ranking last in
investment and perceived value among a field of 24 technologies. While more companies
are investing in sensors for collecting business information (23%), they’re still underrated
in our book and grossly underinvested in by several sectors. Here’s why these three digital
technologies matter, who’s taking the lead in 2015, and how they just might help your own
company become a disruptor.
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Enterprise wearables
NoSQL databases
Business sensors
Enterprise wearables
From fitness bands to smart watches, wearable computing is becoming
an increasingly popular consumer technology for health and wellness
applications. Yet in the enterprise, wearables like body-mounted
displays, lanyards, haptic feedback devices, and wired clothing have
yet to make such inroads, yet where they have been used they have
demonstrated strong value. Compared to last year, investment among
Digital IQ respondents is down: 3% in 2015, compared with 6% in 2014.
The potential
Wearables hold so much promise because
they provide a hands-free way for employees to engage in real-time with contextspecific business information, customers,
or one another. For example, companies
across industries can provide tailored, inthe-moment onboarding and job training
to workers equipped with smart badges or
wearable displays. In industrial settings,
goggles, lanyards, or sensor-embedded
clothing could help workers who are
performing repetitive or dangerous tasks
increase productivity and reduce injuries.
Consumer-facing companies like those in
Healthcare and Life Sciences can use wearables to improve the efficacy of their products and services (from drugs to sunscreen
to smoking cessation), but also increase
effectiveness of their operations and supply
chains. And for Retailers, wearables like
watches or badges can turn each employee
into a sales terminal and increase in-store
collaboration.
The pitfalls
To succeed, wearables must first and
foremost be human-centered—that is,
designed to meet the needs of the user
without getting in his or her way. They
must also provide actionable insights and
seamless integration with other enterprise
data, applications, and the environment.
Companies will also need to address the
considerable security and privacy challenges that come with the collection and
use of such sensitive information. And they
will need to overcome battery challenges
that limit computation, display resolution,
and connectivity.
Considerations for your
business
engagement, real-time access to
expertise, or something else? To
answer that question, CIOs should
partner with functional leaders across
the company, including those in human
capital, operations, sales, and support.
They will consider which user groups,
locations, environments, and tasks can
most benefit from real-time information
and engagement.
• How can we learn and experiment
with wearables for our business?
Explore what other industries, universities, entrepreneurs, and labs are doing
with wearables to identify potential
applications to pilot or formal or informal collaborations. Explore situations in
which hands-free computing could help
increase productivity for tasks constantly
interrupted or that suffer from errors and
inconsistency.
3
%
of companies are currently investing. Top five industries are:
10 %
Healthcare
7%
Technology
6%
Automotive
5%
Industrial
Products
4%
Business and
Professional
Services
• Do we have the right skills to take
advantage of wearables? Look within
the IT, product management, and marketing organizations to assess whether
you have the talent and skills needed,
such as design thinking, user experience
design, and enterprise architecture. Most
wearables are purpose-built but you can
experiment with inexpensive microprocessor platforms, such as Arduino,
RaspberryPi and BeagleBone, sensors,
and displays designed for hobbyists.
Benefits
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Hands-free engagement
Are wearables a good bet for your company? Start with these questions:
Innovative customer and
employee experiences
• Which business opportunities hold
the most potential for our organization—training, safety, customer
Decisions in the moment
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NoSQL databases
As digital technology goes, NoSQL databases are not yet part of the
conversation at most companies. But what they can do certainly is:
flexibly manage and make sense of the seemingly unlimited customer,
product, environment, and social data that powers new apps and
analytics. With only 6% of respondents, investment in NoSQL databases
is low, representing a decline from last year’s 11%. Understandably,
IT leaders in our survey rated them a bit more highly (8%) than their
business counterparts (5%).
Considerations for your
NoSQL databases are an important technol- business
The potential
ogy that’s part of the larger enterprise Big
Data and analytics movement. As businesses look to take advantage of current
and future data—especially unstructured
data from social networks, video, audio,
and sensors—they need solutions that
are more agile, scalable, and flexible—to
complement what relational databases can
offer. NoSQL databases won’t replace relational databases and data warehouses for
mission-critical jobs like transaction processing and reporting, but they will offer a
way forward for new applications that will
take advantage of unstructured data.
NoSQL databases like Cassandra, HBase,
or MongoDB are also attractive to enterprise developers because they require
little overhead and can be up and running
quickly for prototyping new kinds of apps
or data analysis. For example, an industrial
parts supplier might use a NoSQL database to create a mobile ecommerce app
that houses thousands of products with
detailed descriptions, photos, and videos.
As the company adds more products and
users, or even overhauls its app design, the
database can keep up with all the changes.
Or a retailer might embark on a large-scale
social media listening project, which would
use a NoSQL database to quickly analyze
real-time streams of social media data in
order to identify important conversations
and customer trends.
The pitfalls
Because NoSQL databases can be deployed
quickly via the cloud they have the potential to be disruptive to organizations that
lack adequate IT governance. There’s also
a crowded field of NoSQL databases and
emerging vendors that are designed for different tasks, like mobile app development
or data analysis, which may make it difficult to choose a single enterprise standard.
Companies will also need to figure out how
to integrate NoSQL databases with their
existing data architecture.
Should your company begin experimenting with NoSQL databases? Start with
these questions:
• Are our business units or functions already experimenting with
NoSQL databases? Finding out where
pockets of NoSQL innovation may exist
in the organization is an important
first step. Business and IT leaders will
want to frame this discovery process in
a positive light and not as an effort to
eradicate rogue use. Find out how your
enterprise database vendors are planning to integrate NoSQL engines into
their platforms (or may already have).
• How are we currently managing
the unstructured data? Look at the
data storage and analytics techniques
in place or that you are considering for
managing unstructured data and consider whether NoSQL databases offer an
alternative. Also consider how NoSQL
databases might be integrated with
your existing data architecture.
• Which emerging NoSQL products make the most sense for the
applications we are considering?
Identify the most promising pilots for
NoSQL databases, such as analysis of
sensor data or a relationship network
analysis of your customers and salesforce, then learn about and test different products. Consider designating one
or more NoSQL databases as enterprise
standards for your in-house developers.
6
%
of companies are currently investing. Top five industries are:
17 %
Technology
13%
Energy, Utilities
and Mining
9%
Entertainment,
Media and
Communications
8%
Business and
Professional
Services
6%
Financial
Services
Benefits
Powers mobile, web and
Internet of Things apps
Handles vast quantities
of unstructured data
Flexible, scalable
and fast
Business sensors
With so much attention surrounding the Internet of Things, we expected
sensors to be higher on the list when it comes to investment in 2015 and
beyond. We asked companies about their plans for sensors that go in to
products (8%) and those that are used to collect business information
(23%)—what we call the Internet of Business Things. While not every
company makes products and could benefit from the former category,
just about any type of business can take advantage of the latter, with a
low-cost way to gain more visibility into the organization and improve
decision-making. IT leaders recognized more potential for business
sensors (28%) than those respondents in business roles (20%).
The potential
Sensors provide a relatively low-cost way
for companies to learn about their customers, employees, and operations—and
then use that data to improve engagement, sales, productivity, safety, and much
more. Some companies are already using
sensor-equipped warehouses to enable
them to better manage inventory of all
kinds, whether for internal consumption or for parts and materials shipped to
customers. In retail stores, sensors monitor
product stock levels on shelves and signal
stock outs. Retailers can then combine
this real-time information with video
feeds, customer preferences and purchasing history to create a new kind of shopping experience that spans the online and
offline world.
Hotel chains or office buildings can use
infrared sensors to scan the premises to
detect body heat, so the room or floor can
be cleaned as soon as people leave. Sensors
also provide a way to monitor or track
workers in remote or dangerous locations
such as mines. Or they can also be used
by public safety agencies and the private
sector to detect changes in the earth’s
movement or other conditions to predict
earthquakes, forest fires, and other natural
disasters. Hospitals also use sensors for
many safety applications—from enforcing
hand washing and tracking medications
to monitoring the temperature in blood
banks and operating rooms. These are just
a sampling of the many potential sensor
applications possible.
The pitfalls
Sensor technology is relatively immature:
there are a large number of vendors and
few standards exist. Early adopters should
be prepared to experiment and be flexible as the technology and market evolve.
Sensors will generate a great deal of data,
which businesses will need to collect, store,
protect, and analyze. They’ll also need to
ensure they have appropriate tools, infrastructure, and talent in place to process
and then integrate sensor data with other
enterprise data. As always, data security
and privacy challenges are critical.
Considerations for your
business
23
companies are % ofcurrently
investing. Top five industries are:
52 %
Retail and
Consumer
33 %
Industrial
Products
30 %
Hospitality and Leisure
27 %
Energy, Utilities
and Mining
25%
Automotive
How can your company begin taking
advantage of sensors that collect business
information? Start with these questions:
• Which areas of our operations
could benefit from more transparency? Your CIO, COO, and other
functional leaders can begin identifying
processes, product flows, people, and
places where more timely or accurate
data is needed. Consider how a smallscale sensor pilot could surface data that
would inform new ways of working.
• In customer settings, how can
sensors help us better meet their
needs? Companies can look at sales
and service environments to identify
where interactions with customers (all or
individual ones) could be improved with
better information about their behaviors
and expectations.
• What new insights can be gained
or questions be more effectively
answered with better data? Consider
the type of data needed to answer those
questions, such as quantity, quality, location, movement, and so on. Also think
about the people, places, processes, and
products in your organization that are
associated with these questions.
Benefits
Ubiquitous, low-cost
data collection
Better visibility
into operations
Improved context-specific decisions and interactions
Next steps for your business
Our surprising bets raise important questions for every enterprise, and as with any technology
ranking your organization will consider both shorter- and longer-term bets. Beyond the top-ranking
fundamentals of cybersecurity, private cloud, and data mining and analysis, it’s also worth calling
out the few mainstream technologies notably absent from the top of our rankings. Customer mobile
applications (24%), public cloud applications (18%), and public cloud infrastructure (16%) ranked
much lower than expected. Do companies no longer see value here? Not necessarily.
We see the intense focus on cyber threats and data security as possibly explaining why companies are
prioritizing private cloud over public. And on the mobile front, many businesses that have already
made significant investments in prior years—for example mobile customer engagement ranked in
the top-three in last year’s Digital IQ Survey—are our now continuing to leverage those investments.
Our list, taken alongside the many other top-10 tech lists that come out each year, may feel like a lot
to navigate. But what is important as a leader in your organization, is not the lists themselves, but
that you have a sound approach for evaluating, experimenting, and adopting the technologies with
the most potential value for your unique business. PwC can help guide you through this journey as
you set priorities—and the course of your business.
About the Survey
The Digital IQ Survey preview was conducted in December 2014 by the Economist Intelligence
Unit (EIU). They surveyed 503 business and IT leaders in 14 countries across Europe, Asia, and
North America. 36% of respondents were IT executives. 64% were business executives.
For more information, please visit: www.pwc.com/us/tech-trends
Contacts
Chris Curran
Advisory principal and Chief Technologist
(214) 754 5055
[email protected]
Gerard Verweij
Advisory principal and US Technology Consulting Leader
(617) 530 7015
[email protected]
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