Editor's Note: As business becomes fully digitized and technology becomes a key driver of growth and differentiation, it is important to understand technology trends so that companies can seize the opportunities that lie ahead. Accenture's 2013 Technology Outlook focuses on seven major technology innovation trends that will shape the future, and explains the impact of these trends on business from multiple perspectives, as well as the strategies that organizations can take to address them. ?0?2 The transformation of business by technology has already begun, so there is no time to lose. Organizations need to be able to anticipate and respond to the changes that are now being led by technology. However, over the past 25 years, organizations have focused on their core business and have worked hard to divest and outsource non-core operations. In fact, in the process of streamlining operations, many organizations have abandoned essential IT functions. Businesses that are not supported by information and technology are in serious jeopardy in today's digital environment. In the new technological era, digitization will be the key to innovation and business expansion. Accenture has identified seven key technology trends for public*** and private sector organizations that will impact their future growth. Technology will be key to driving change in digital strategies: Instead of simply representing consumers as cold digital transactions, cookie files or transaction records or statistics, businesses will see them as real customers with differentiated needs. Currently, most companies are using mobile technologies, social networking sites and contextual services to learn more about consumer records, tendencies and preferences, but are neglecting to improve the way they communicate with consumers through these new digital methods. On the surface, these may seem to represent new ways of user experience and even new sales channels, but in fact are not real business opportunities. When all of these approaches are brought together, it represents a key new way to engage customers and sustain consumer loyalty - ubiquitous customer relationship management. The key to accomplishing this shift is understanding that consumers are no longer just buyers, they are interconnected consumers: they use social networks, they make like-minded friends, and they are connected because they like the same brands. Businesses should realize that social media and mobile technologies are not just a set of new channels to push information to consumers, but that the new technologies will change the simple function of promoting their products from pushing advertisements, for example, to providing services and value. Organizations must incorporate the new capabilities offered by social media, as well as other new technologies such as data analytics and mobile, in order to redesign consumer interactions in ways that were previously thought of but never implemented. For example, Meat Pack, a footwear retailer based in Guatemala, developed a mobile application called Hijack that engages consumers through mobile interactions. When a consumer with the app installed enters a competitor's store, the app instantly pushes a Meat Pack promotion to the consumer and drives the consumer to the Meat Pack store at a decreasing rate of 99% (down to 1%) per second. When the consumer enters the store, the discount change stops, and after the consumer spends money at the displayed discount rate, the app in turn automatically updates his or her Facebook status and notifies all those who follow this consumer. So, first, relationships are everywhere, and companies need to focus again on their relationships with consumers. In particular, they need to think outside the traditional mindset of e-commerce and marketing, reposition their digital strategies, and use digital tools to return to the kind of intimate customer relationships that used to characterize the neighborhood store. However, the problem organizations face today is not a lack of data, but a lack of the right data. Embedded data analytics is therefore the second major trend brought about by the total digitization of business. As a result, enterprises need to rethink their future software designs to add analytics to satisfy basic application functionality in order to extract answers that contain rich data to answer their key business questions. Enterprises tend to believe that the more data they collect, the easier it is to capitalize on trends, patterns, opportunities, and competitive advantages. As a result, organizations are very focused on big data and the ability to use new, unstructured data. It all stems from the idea that "more data" equals "better data". But this assertion is not entirely true. Accumulating data is not the goal of an organization; supporting business units in answering questions, gaining intelligence and applying that intelligence to help the organization achieve its fundamental goals is the purpose of collecting data. In order to collect the right data, it is necessary for organizations to intentionally add new data collection requirements during the software development process. These features need to be part of the pre-planning process for the system roadmap, not added as an afterthought. Organizations need to be clear about what information is being collected before they can start applying it. Many organizations in the logistics, transportation and energy industries, for example, have already identified the need to track the movement of goods and power usage. Organizations should no longer think of data as a warehouse, but rather as a supply chain. After obtaining an effective data source, companies must carry out a combination of analytics, similar to a factory assembly line assembling parts from different suppliers. Data is not static, and organizations will manipulate the data in the supply chain, adding more data, applying the latest data for updates, and so on. In addition to acquiring data, organizations must also feed analytics back to suppliers to help them continuously improve the quality of data collection.