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Tech Trends 2014
Inspiring Disruption

Welcome to Deloitte’s fifth annual Technology Trends report. Each year, we study the ever-
evolving technology landscape, focusing on disruptive trends that are transforming business,
government, and society. Once again, we’ve selected 10 topics that have the opportunity to impact
organizations across industries, geographies, and sizes over the next 18 to 24 months.
The theme of this year’s report is Inspiring Disruption. In it, we discuss 10 trends that exemplify
the unprecedented potential for emerging technologies to reshape how work gets done, how
businesses grow, and how markets and industries evolve. These disruptive technologies challenge
CIOs to anticipate their potential organizational impacts. And while today’s demands are by no
means trivial, the trends we describe offer CIOs the opportunity to shape tomorrow—to inspire
others, to create value, and to transform “business as usual.”
The list of trends is developed using an ongoing process of primary and secondary research
that involves:
• Feedback from client executives on current and future priorities
• Perspectives from industry and academic luminaries
• Research by alliance partners, industry analysts, and competitor positioning
• Crowdsourced ideas and examples from our global network of practitioners
As in prior years, we’ve organized the trends into two categories. Disruptors are areas that
can create sustainable positive disruption in IT capabilities, business operations, and sometimes
even business models. Enablers are technologies in which many CIOs have already invested time
and effort, but that warrant another look because of new developments, new capabilities, or new
potential use cases. Each trend is presented with multiple examples of adoption to show the trend
at work. This year, we’ve added a longer-form Lesson from the front lines to each chapter to offer a
more detailed look at an early use case. Also, each chapter includes a personal point of view in the
My take section.
Information technology continues to be dominated by five forces: analytics, mobile, social,
cloud, and cyber. Their continuing impact is highlighted in chapters dedicated to wearables, cloud
orchestration, social activation, and cognitive analytics. Cyber is a recurring thread throughout the
report: more important than ever, but embedded into thinking about how to be secure, vigilant, and
resilient in approaching disruptive technologies.
Introduction
Tech Trends 2014: Inspiring Disruption
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For the first time, we’ve added a section dedicated to exponential technologies, working with
Singularity University to highlight five innovative technologies that may take longer than our
standard 24-month time horizon for businesses to harness them—but whose eventual impact
may be profound. Examples include artificial intelligence, robotics, and additive manufacturing
(3-D printing). The research, experimentation, and invention behind these “exponentials” are the
building blocks for many of our technology trends. Our goal is to provide a high-level introduction
to each exponential—a snapshot of what it is, where it comes from, and where it’s going.
Each of the 2014 trends is relevant today. Each has significant momentum and potential to make
a business impact. And each warrants timely consideration—even if the strategy is to wait and
see. But whatever you do, don’t be caught unaware—or unprepared. Use these forces to inspire, to
transform. And to disrupt.
We welcome your comments, questions, and feedback. And a sincere “thank you” to the many
executives and organizations that have helped provide input for Tech Trends 2014; your time and
insights were invaluable. We look forward to your continued innovation, impact, and inspiration.
Bill Briggs
Chief Technology Officer
Deloitte Consulting LLP
wbriggs@deloitte.com
Twitter: @wdbthree
Introduction
3

4

CIOs have historically focused on core
delivery and operations with a budget and
operating model built around low risk—buying
enterprise-class software, building a talent base
that could support a well-defined future state,
driving for efficiencies in light of constant
cost pressures. More and more CIOs, faced
with disruptive forces such as crowdsourcing,1
mobile only,2
big data,3
and cybersecurity,4
are
shifting from a world of known problems into
one filled with unknowns. To make matters
worse, organizational governance has become
more complex as barriers for other parts
of the business to enter the technical arena
have fallen.
CIOs are seeing this divergent behavior—
and realizing that their current tools for
managing risk and leveraging assets may
not work in this new world. Instead, many
are beginning to manage their technology
portfolios in ways that drive enterprise value,
actively monitor the performance of the
portfolios, and communicate the portfolios’
positions in language the business can grasp.
To do this, CIOs are borrowing from the
playbook of today’s leading venture capitalists
(VCs). As a result, they are reshaping how they
run the business of IT.5
Thinking like a VC
Effective VCs are often shrewd
businesspeople who operate across a
range of intertwined capabilities. They
manage portfolios of investments,
continually evaluating individual and
aggregate performance in terms of value,
risk, and reward. They deliberately attract
entrepreneurial talent with technical skills
and business savvy—as well as vision, passion,
and the intangible spark of leadership. And
they cultivate agile organizations to anticipate
and respond to changing market conditions—
open to decisions to exit, take public, reinvest,
or divest. These capabilities are closely
related to the CIO’s leadership role in today’s
growth-oriented organization.
Portfolio investment strategy. CIOs today
juggle an ever-growing portfolio of projects,
ranging from long-term strategic initiatives
to keeping the lights on. CIOs need clear lines
of sight across their portfolio of programs
and projects—the objectives, dependencies,
status, finances, associated resources, and risk
profiles. But in-flight initiatives are only one
piece of their balance sheet. CIOs should also
understand their assets—hardware, software,
facilities, delivery model (the way work gets
CIO as venture capitalist
Trading on IT’s assets, talent, risk, and results
CIOs who want to help drive business growth and innovation will likely need
to develop a new mindset and new capabilities. Like venture capitalists, CIOs
should actively manage their IT portfolio in a way that drives enterprise value
and evaluate portfolio performance in terms that business leaders understand—
value, risk, and time horizon to reward. CIOs who can combine this with agility
and align the desired talent can reshape how they run the business of IT.
7

done), contracts, vendors, and people. The
portfolio of IT is a complex one. But that
complexity is no excuse for flying blind.
Valuation. An effective portfolio view
enables the CIO to continually evaluate the
strategic performance of each asset, project,
and vendor in terms that business leaders
understand. A CIO with a VC mindset doesn’t
just report on the organization’s to-do list or
inventory of assets; the CIO communicates
the quantitative and qualitative value the IT
organization contributes to the business. This
means delineating the strategic importance
of programs, projects, and assets. What
initiatives are mission-critical for the business?
What is the confidence level around on-time,
on-budget delivery? How deliberately are
business case results tracked? Which hardware
and software assets are identified for growth?
For sunsetting? For active retirement? How
“heavy” a balance sheet do you want to carry?
Handicap. In many emerging areas, there
are no clearly identifiable winners. How much
do you know about the product roadmap
of your existing providers? Are you actively
scanning small and emergent players? No
part of your portfolio should be off-limits—
software, hardware, services, talent, data,
methods, and tools. Do you have the skills and
the discipline to evaluate and predict how the
landscape will evolve—not only in the market
but, more importantly, for your company,
for your customers, and for your business
partners? Make sure you are getting what you
need in order to provide what the business
wants from IT. And be ready to reevaluate
in light of market shifts, M&A events, or
leadership transitions.
Portfolio management1
As IT budgets continue to increase, it is more important to
manage them closely. In 2013, 38% of organizations created
a portfolio approach to IT.2
IT needs the right skillset to maintain systems and innovate.
Capabilities map for CIOs
61%operational spending
Increase Maintain
Business skill gaps within IT Technical skill gaps
Decrease
Talent alignment3
2012 2013
83% of businesses have future
plans to implement agile, an
increase from 59% last year.
57%capital spending
42%business analysis
30%technology strategy
29%analytics & big data
52%thinking like the business
46%thinking strategically
42%communicating effectively
42%business analysis
30%technology strategy
29%analytics & big data
CIOs are adopting agile methods to expedite delivery times
and improve business alignment. Organizations using agile
have seen promising results:
Agile4
Improve Maintain Worsen
productivity
90%ability to change priorities
85%
84%project visibilty
Sources: 1
Computer Economics, IT spending and stafﬁng benchmarks
2013/2014, chapter 1, http://www.computereconomics.com/page.cfm?
name=it%20spending%20and%20stafﬁng%20study, accessed January 3,
2014. 2
CIO Magazine, 2013 state of the CIO survey, January 2, 2013,
http://www.cio.com/slideshow/detail/79671, accessed January 3, 2014.
3
Deloitte MCS Limited, The Deloitte CIO Survey 2013. Reconnect. Rebuild.
Reimagine. Redeliver., 2013. 4
VersionOne, Seventh annual state of agile
development survey, 2013, http://www.versionone.com/state-of-agile-
survey-results, accessed January 3, 2014.
8

Hedge. What emerging investments are you
making, whether in broad technologies or with
specific entities? At what stage are you getting
involved? How will you incubate, invest,
divest? If you build dependencies on start-ups
or niche players, you will need to evaluate
not only the technology but the founders and
their business models. Build a concession
architecture that allows you to port assets to
different players or to shutter underperforming
investments or partnerships in order to move
on to the next opportunity.
Promotion. The brand of IT is maligned
in some organizations, with the CIO viewed
as the operator of the company’s technology
assets but not as a strategist or catalyst for
innovation.6
Rethinking the role as a VC gives
the CIO a backdrop for the business to elevate
the understanding—and appreciation—of
his or her function. There’s no overnight fix.
Understand your current brand permission,
then build awareness about IT’s mission,
effectiveness, and vision. Internally, this is
important in order to enhance IT’s charter.
IT should be a board-level topic—recognized
as one of the crown jewels of the company.
Externally, it’s important to attract talent—
and attention. Even some leading VCs have
launched PR and marketing efforts.7
Don’t
assume that once it’s built, they will come.
Talent brokering. The portfolio mindset
extends to talent management as well. Talent
scarcity is a universal concern, but it has a
particular impact on IT. Consider the skills
and capabilities that will be needed to deliver
on strategic initiatives, as well as those required
to maintain existing systems and processes.
Where are the gaps? Which capabilities can
be grown from existing staff? Which should
be acquired? How can top talent be identified,
developed, and hoarded—regardless of title
or tenure? How can external talent be tapped?
Think beyond consultants, agencies, and
contractors. Can you leverage the crowd—
either transactionally8
or by finding a way to
activate customers and hobbyists?9
CIOs need
doers and thinkers just like VCs, but they also
need leaders. Use this age of innovation as a
means to launch initiatives to reward (and
retain) demonstrated talent with the curiosity
and horsepower to help lead growth areas.
Demand for talent is outstripping supply in
many shops—and expected time to value
is shrinking.
Agility. Disruption is a given in technology
today, and is extending into many aspects of
the business. The balancing act is delicate—
driving for more nimble, responsive delivery
while maintaining architectural integrity and
making solutions built to run.
In this new world, the CIO’s role should
expand from enabling operations with
technical services to building a technology
footprint that fuels, and can be responsive to,
the executive team’s growth and investment
strategy. Integration, data, and architecture
capabilities should be developed into
disciplines, serving as the core pillars of
business agility.
9

Growth and change
Cisco’s IT organization uses a three-tiered model to drive its mission: Run the business—
focusing on efficiency, quality, and optimization of cost performance; grow the business—helping to
drive investments that impact business performance; and change the business—transforming how
the organization operates and the markets in which it competes. At Cisco, line-of-business CIOs are
encouraged to drive more of their investment portfolio towards growth and change. This doesn’t
mean that total cost of ownership isn’t emphasized, but the “better, faster, cheaper” mindset is not
just applied to the business of IT—it’s just as important to the business of the business. Technology
spend is anchored in running or changing the business—which requires not just bilateral
commitment, but ongoing education and teaming between IT and the business.
Line-of-business CIOs look at initiatives as vehicles for tech-enabled business growth and
see their roles as orchestrators and shapers. At the financial level, this means actively managing
a portfolio of assets with an understanding of cost, return, risk, and strategic importance. More
than just inventorying and reporting, it means helping to set priorities, translating the potential of
disruptive technologies and making them meaningful, and setting up the organization for speed
and agility. Traditional waterfall methodologies have given way to agile—fast, iterative deployments
where the business is fully engaged. At the technology level, orchestration is about creating a
seamless experience across a technology landscape that is growing more diverse and complex,
bringing together a mix of on- and off-premises solutions—and making sure employees, customers,
and business partners aren’t exposed to behind-the-scenes complexity. Integration and architecture
have been established as key disciplines fueling immediate investments in sales effectiveness, digital
marketing across devices/channels, and the technical backbone behind the Internet of Everything.
Cisco has also started to engage more directly with the venture capital and start-up communities.
Corporate CIO Rebecca Jacoby has established a company-wide reference architecture covering
business, operational, systems, and technology aspects. Emerging solutions that comply with the
reference architecture are actively pursued—often in response to specific problems or opportunities
the company is trying to address. Like other IT investments, though, an assessment of the solution
is made not just on its ability to change the business, but on the ongoing impact on running the
business. Like a venture capitalist, the IT organization measures the portfolio in absolute terms—
potential value weighed against total cost of service. Cisco emphasizes measurement of vision,
strategy, and execution according to the needs of the business. Because of these approaches,
Cisco is prepared to deal with whatever the future brings—acquisitions, product innovation, and
investments in adjacent services and solutions.
Lessons from the front lines
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A view from the Valley10
Founded in 1989, Hummer Winblad
Venture Partners (HWVP) was the first
venture capital fund to invest exclusively in
software companies. HWVP has deployed over
$1 billion of cumulative capital in software
investments starting at the first venture round
of over 100 enterprise software companies. As
such, HWVP has a singular perspective into
not just what it takes to effectively manage
an investment portfolio, but also into how
Fortune 100 companies are responding to this
seminal time in the history of technology.
Unlike those who see innovation as a
crescendo steadily building over time, HWVP
sees a different, bumpier reality—defined by
periods of disproportionate change, embodied
by today’s era of technology disruption.
Historically, large enterprises have
encouraged new software vendors to focus on
“embracing and extending” in-place software
infrastructure. This approach can work if
innovation is gradual, but can break down if
innovation impacts overall business strategies.
We are at a major disruption point where
legacy systems likely cannot be extended.
The digitization of the customer experience
across industries—driven by mobile, social,
cloud, and big data—is changing the nature of
data itself, as businesses shift their focus from
products to customers. Siloed systems aren’t
equipped to handle behavioral data, sentiment,
and largely unstructured context. Digital
requires a different horizontal stack.
The need to keep pace with new business
and technological realities could be a great
backdrop for CIOs to shift focus from cost,
compliance, and maintenance to being in the
business of “new.” CIOs should be a strategy
anchor for big companies: a board-level
position that doesn’t just enable but is a catalyst
for growth.
HWVP doesn’t have a “VC handbook” that
guides its investments. And neither will CIOs.
HWVP co-founder Ann Winblad believes we
are entering an era where companies should
take risks: They should swim in the river of
innovation and be prepared to make multiple
bets to discover what innovation really means
for their company. It could lead to near-
term competitive disadvantage—especially
as large organizations react to the exploding
population of small vendors that are defining
tomorrow. Firms that CIOs may not have
heard of with a small operating footprint may
become essential partners.
Large companies should not wait for
new market leaders to emerge. That means
performing your own market analysis and
increasing the value of existing partners and
alliances—asking them to broker introductions
or co-invest in early prototyping. Instead of
asking small players to go through qualifying
paces, create low-cost, low-risk prototypes and
pilots to experiment with their technologies
to solve business problems. Many CIOs of
large companies use start-ups to enable lines
of businesses—and help jointly own the
investment in tomorrow.
HWVP is in the business of identifying—
and sometimes provoking—patterns. It’s the
“venture” part of venture capital. With the
customer as the business’s new cerebral cortex
and growth moving at the speed of digital,
CIOs should act more like VCs. Not every bet
will be a winner, but by keeping a portfolio
of investments, moving ahead of tested
(and sometimes stale) market trends, and
keeping a mindset towards engagement, big
companies can be poised to compete in these
unprecedentedly exciting times.
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There are multiple drivers for why CIOs need
to think like a venture capitalist. The first is the
incredible pace of technological change. CIOs
need to place bets—like VCs do—that a given
product or service is going to hit the market
at the right time and fill a niche that others
don’t. It’s often no longer acceptable to use one
vendor for all your technology needs. Second,
given all the information now accessible to
everyone, it’s hard to gain a competitive
advantage. VCs try to create a
competitive advantage by investing in
companies to make a profit— and
CIOs try to create a competitive
advantage by investing in services
and capabilities to reap the
benefits before competitors
can. And third, to avoid
trailing your competitors, CIOs
need to take risks. VCs take
balanced risks, conducting
market research, and being
thoughtful about selection
and the company’s fit with the
team. Taking risks is the hardest
part for CIOs; we’ve all seen the
damage failed projects can do
to the IT department’s reputation.
But taking risks means accepting not
just the potential, but the inevitability
of failure. In my judgment, if you’re
too afraid of that, your company will likely
always trail your competitors. The key is to
work with the rest of the C-suite to recognize
that some level of risk is part of the ground rules.
And if you’re going to fail, fail fast— cutting
your losses and moving on to the next bet.
In addition to my role as CIO of Bloomin’ Brands,
I also serve on the CIO advisory board for Sierra
Ventures, a venture capital firm. Having that
exposure into a VC firm has influenced my
behavior as a CIO. When I first joined Bloomin’
Brands, one of my priorities was to focus on
where the market was going to be three years
out and find something that would allow us to
get out in front. At that time, we weren’t yet a
cloud organization, but I knew we eventually
would be, and invested in a cloud-based
integration product. Some in my IT organization
were nervous at the time, knowing the
integration would be challenging, but we
knew it would also be challenging for our
competitors—and we were able to be an early
adopter and gain the advantage.
I have also adapted my approach to vendor
and talent management. The current landscape
changes how you deal with vendors. You’re
working with both large, established companies
and the new set of entrants, many of whom
are entrepreneurs who sometimes have never
done an enterprise contract before. On the
talent side, we increasingly hire for agility. We
look for people who can be nimble and move at
the same pace as the business. We recruit those
who learn based on principle rather than by rote
syntax and command so they can more easily
move from one product to another.
As much as there are similarities between VCs
and today’s CIOs, there are also some tenets of
venture capitalism that don’t necessarily make
sense for a CIO to adopt. The first is the size
of your investment portfolio. While the VC can
have 15–25 investments at once, the CIO may
be able to balance only a handful. The second is
the breadth of the portfolio. The VC can afford
to go after multiple spaces, but the CIO’s lens is
rightfully constrained by the company’s industry
and the needs of the business. There may be
some interesting capabilities you need to turn
down because they just aren’t the right fit.
To start on the path of CIO-as-venture-capitalist,
try to open your mind to becoming more of a
risk taker and to look at technology solutions
that are less established. Work through
your own risk profile—with the rest of your
C-suite—and determine how much risk you
are willing to take on. Then, align yourself with
folks who can help you start to venture into
this space and take advantage of some of the
early-stage solutions.
My take
Charles Weston, SVP and chief information officer (retired),
Bloomin’ Brands
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Mastering VC capabilities may
challenge many CIOs whose traditional
role has been to meet business demands for
reliable, cost-efficient technologies. And even
if the capabilities could materialize overnight,
earning the credibility that is required to
become active participants in strategic
leadership conversations will likely be a
gradual process for many CIOs.
To complicate matters, new technology
shifts—especially those powered by analytics,
mobile, social, cloud, and cyber—intensify
talent shortages and process constraints.
These gaps make creating a balanced portfolio
across traditional and emerging IT services
even more difficult. As business users bypass
IT to adopt cloud-based point solutions,
organizational technology footprints are
becoming more and more complex. Visibility
into, and control of, the portfolio becomes
harder to attain. CIOs have an imperative to
get ahead of the curve.
This is especially true in M&A, where
change is constantly disruptive. Many
industries are rife with potential investments
and divestitures. But few organizations can
acquire, sell, or divest with surgical precision
without reinventing the wheel with each
transaction. Seventy percent of mergers and
acquisitions fail to meet their expectations.
The value from mergers, acquisitions, and
divestitures is more directly linked to getting
IT right than anything else.11
Transformation takes time, but small first
steps can make a difference:
• Inventory the technology portfolio. What
technologies does your organization deploy
today? Focus on the full range, including
solutions procured outside of IT. What
projects are in play? What vendors do you
depend on? What assets are in use, and
where are they located? How does each
asset contribute to the business mission,
and what is its useful remaining life? It’s not
enough to rationalize your assets. Create a
model to describe the categories of assets
and investments, and use that to guide
priorities. Many organizations use Gartner’s
Pace-Layered Application Strategy, breaking
down their IT landscape into systems of
record, systems of differentiation, and
systems of innovation. Inventorying and
classification is just an enabling step,
though. What matters is how you use
the visibility to direct focus and capital,
balancing across the categories in a way
that enables (and amplifies) your business
strategy. Budgeting cycles typically run like
Shark Tank—with funds allocated by the
business based on its priorities.
• Evaluate the portfolio. Define the risk,
value, and strategic importance of each
portfolio item. Identify where costs/
risks outweigh value. Pinpoint potential
trouble spots, such as contracts with
unclear service-level agreements or data
ownership provisions. Understand each
vendor’s viability—not just in terms of
capital and capacity, but also how well
the vendor’s roadmap aligns with your
company’s vision. Look for portfolio
clusters: Is the proportion of investments
in maintenance and upkeep appropriate
when compared with investments in new
strategic opportunities? Are there gaps that
could hold the organization back? Strive
for balance between extending legacy
systems and investments in innovation.
Aim for transparency, letting your business
counterparts appreciate the exhaustive
demand curve as well as the thinking that
defines priorities.
Where do you start?
13

• Double down on winners. And fold
the losers. VCs expect some assets to
underperform, and they are willing to
cut their losses. CIOs should encourage
intelligent risk-taking within the
organization. Failure due to poor execution
is unacceptable, but setbacks resulting from
exploring innovative ideas are inevitable
for organizations that want to compete
in a high-growth environment. Borrow
from the VC playbook—intentionally
being conservative in initial funding to
inspire creativity and creating more natural
checkpoints. In either case, be prepared to
recommend that the organization pull the
plug when a project isn’t delivering.
• Direct line of sight to revenue. Come
up with an approach to vet technologies
and their companies to better identify and
evaluate winners and losers. Share your
accomplishments and goals in terms that
the business understands. Openly discuss
the state of the projects and assets in which
the business has invested. While few CIOs
today have the sole power to initiate or
withdraw substantial investments, many
should develop the ability to evaluate the
portfolio objectively. The first few wins can
become the centerpiece of your campaign
for change.
14

Authors
Tom Galizia, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Tom Galizia is the national leader of Deloitte Consulting LLP’s
Technology Strategy and Architecture practice that focuses on
enabling new IT capabilities to successfully navigate changing
market dynamics, delivering IT-enabled business strategy
and transformation, and driving efficient IT operations.
Chris Garibaldi, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Chris Garibaldi is a principal in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s
Technology Strategy and Architecture practice and leads
the Project Portfolio Management practice. With 20 years
of experience in business strategy, Chris possesses a unique
perspective on the evolution of business and IT management.
Bottom line
At first blush, comparisons between CIOs and venture capitalists may seem like a stretch. For
example, CIOs can’t shoot from the hip on risky investments. They provide critical services that the
business simply can’t do without, where the risk of getting it wrong could be catastrophic. At the
same time, there’s a lot to learn from the portfolio mindset that VCs bring to their work: balancing
investments in legacy systems, innovation, and even bleeding-edge technologies; understanding—and
communicating—business value; and aligning talent with the business mission. Venture capitalists
operate in a high-stakes environment where extraordinary value creation and inevitable losses can
coexist inside a portfolio of calculated investments. So do CIOs.
15

Endnotes
1. Deloitte Consulting LLP, Tech Trends 2014: Inspiring disruption, 2014, chapter 3.
2. Deloitte Consulting LLP, Tech Trends 2013: Elements of postdigital, 2013, chapter 2.
6. CIO Journal by Wall Street Journal, “The four faces of the CIO,” October 28, 2013, http://
deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2013/10/28/the-four-faces-of-the-cio/, accessed December 19, 2013.
7. Nicole Perlroth, “Venture capital firms, once discreet, learn the promotional game,” New York Times,
July 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/business/venture-capital-firms-once-discreet-
learn-the-promotional-game.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&, accessed December 19, 2013.
10. Ann Winblad (co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners),
discussion with the author, January 9, 2014.
11. Janice M. Roehl-Anderson, M&A Information Technology Best Practices (New Jersey: Wiley, 2013).
16

For decades, companies have dealt
with information in a familiar way—
deliberately exploring known data sets to
gain insights. Whether by queries, reports,
or advanced analytical models, explicit rules
have been applied to universes of data to
answer questions and guide decision making.
The underlying technologies for storage,
visualization, statistical modeling, and business
intelligence have continued to evolve, and
we’re far from reaching the limits of these
traditional techniques.
Today, analytical systems that enable better
data-driven decisions are at a crossroads with
respect to where the work gets done. While
they leverage technology for data-handling and
number-crunching, the hard work of forming
and testing hypotheses, tuning models, and
tweaking data structures is still reliant on
people. Much of the grunt work is carried out
by computers, while much of the thinking
is dependent on specific human beings with
specific skills and experience that are hard to
replace and hard to scale.
A new approach to information
discovery and decision making
For the first time in computing history,
it’s possible for machines to learn from
experience and penetrate the complexity
of data to identify associations. The field
is called cognitive analyticsTM
—inspired by
how the human brain processes information,
draws conclusions, and codifies instincts and
experience into learning. Instead of depending
on predefined rules and structured queries to
uncover answers, cognitive analytics relies on
technology systems to generate hypotheses,
drawing from a wide variety of potentially
relevant information and connections. Possible
answers are expressed as recommendations,
along with the system’s self-assessed ranking
of how confident it is in the accuracy of the
response. Unlike in traditional analysis,
the more data fed to a machine learning
system, the more it can learn, resulting in
higher-quality insights.
Cognitive analytics can push past the
limitations of human cognition, allowing us
to process and understand big data in real
time, undaunted by exploding volumes of
data or wild fluctuations in form, structure,
and quality. Context-based hypotheses can
be formed by exploring massive numbers of
permutations of potential relationships of
influence and causality—leading to conclusions
unconstrained by organizational biases. In
academia, the techniques have been applied to
the study of reading, learning, and language
Cognitive analytics
Wow me with blinding insights, HAL
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing
have moved from experimental concepts to potential business disruptors—
harnessing Internet speed, cloud scale, and adaptive mastery of business
processes to drive insights that aid real-time decision making. For
organizations that want to improve their ability to sense and respond,
cognitive analytics can be a powerful way to bridge the gap between
the intent of big data and the reality of practical decision making.
Cognitive analytics
19

development. The Boltzmann machine1
and the Never-Ending Language Learning
(NELL)2
projects are popular examples. In the
consumer world, pieces of cognitive analytics
form the core of artificial personal assistants
such as Apple’s Siri® voice recognition software3
and the Google Now service, as well as the
backbone for the Xbox® video game system’s
verbal command interface in Kinect®.
Even more interesting use cases exist in
the commercial realm. Early instances of
cognitive analytics can be found in health
care, where systems are being used to
improve the quality of patient outcomes.
A wide range of structured inputs, such as
claims records, patient files, and outbreak
statistics, are coupled with unstructured
inputs such as medical journals and textbooks,
clinician notes, and social media feeds.
Patient diagnoses can incorporate new
medical evidence and individual patient
histories, removing economic and geographic
constraints that can prevent access to leading
medical knowledge.
1950
Alan Turing publishes
Computing Machinery
and Intelligence, in which
he proposes what is now
referred to as the Turing
Test: an experiment that
tests a machine’s ability
to exhibit intelligent
human behavior.1
1968
The first commercial
database management
system, or Information
Management System
(IMS), tracks huge
amounts of structured
data such as bills of
materials for NASA’s
Apollo Moon mission.2
1972
Work begins on MYCIN,
an early expert system
that identifies infectious
blood diseases using an
inference engine and
suggests diagnoses and
treatments. Despite high
performance, it is not
used in practice.3
1980s
Steady increases in
computing power fuel
a revolution in natural
language processing as
early algorithms such as
decision trees and neural
network models are
introduced.4
Highlights in the history of cognitive analytics
1950 1960 1970 1980
1e+4
1e+12
1e+8
computations per kilowatt-hour9
Sources: 1
A. M. Turing, "Computing machinery and intelligence," 1950, Mind 49: 433-460, http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf,
accessed December 27, 2013. 2
IBM, "Icons of progress: Information management system," http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/
icons/ibmims, accessed December 27, 2013. 3
Edward H. Shortliffe, A rule-based approach to the generation of advice and explanations in clinical
medicine, Stanford University Knowledge Systems Laboratory, 1977. 4
Joab Jackson, "Biologically inspired: How neural networks are finally maturing,"
ComputerWorld, December 17, 2013, http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=213D1459-C657-E067-397E42988ACBFC00, accessed December 27,
2013. 5
IBM, "Icons of progress: TAKMI - Bringing order to unstructured data," http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/takmi,
accessed December 27, 2013.
20

In financial services, cognitive analytics
is being used to advise and execute trading,
as well as for advanced fraud detection and
risk underwriting. In retail, cognitive systems
operate as customer service agents, in-store
kiosks, and digital store clerks—providing
answers to customers’ questions about
products, trends, recommendations, and
support. Another promising area for cognitive
analytics involves the concept of “tuning”
complex global systems such as supply chains
and cloud networks.
Getting practical
In practical terms, cognitive analytics is an
extension of cognitive computing, which is
made up of three main components: machine
learning, natural language processing, and
advancements in the enabling infrastructure.
Machine learning, or deep learning,4
is an
artificial intelligence5
technique modeled after
characteristics of the human brain. A machine
learning system explores many divergent
concepts for possible connections, expresses
potential new ideas with relative confidence
1997
TAKMI, or Text Analysis
and Knowledge Mining,
is developed in Tokyo by
IBM to capture and utilize
knowledge embedded in
text files through mining
data and metadata in
books, journals, emails,
audio and video files, etc.5
2004
The High Performance
Computing Revitalization
Act sets requirements for
the Secretary of Energy
for the development of,
capabilities for, and access
to high-end computing
systems for scientific and
engineering applications.6
2009-2010
Content analytics improve
capabilities in unstructured
data processing; streaming
analytics process patient
data to identify disease
patterns in real time;
and predictive analytics
forecast the attitudes and
behavior of customers.7
Today
IBM, WellPoint, and
Memorial Sloan Kettering
use Watson to give
doctors treatment options
in seconds. Streaming
analytics process 5 million
messages of market data
per second to speed up
trading decisions.8
1990 2000 2010
Natural language processingMachine learningComputing
6
National Science Foundation, "Department of Energy: High-end Computing Revitalization Act of 2004," http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/aaac/
p_l_108-423_doe_high-end_computing_revitalization_act_of_2004.pdf, November 30, 2004, accessed January 6, 2014. 7
IBM, "Icons of progress:
TAKMI - Bringing order to unstructured data," http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/takmi, accessed December 27, 2013;
IBM, "Icons of progress: The invention of stream computing," http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/streamcomputing,
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, "IBM Watson hard at work: New breakthroughs transform quality care for
patients," http://www.mskcc.org/pressroom/press/ibm-watson-hard-work-new-breakthroughs-transform-quality-care-patients, accessed December 27,
2013. 9
Economist, "A deeper law than Moore's?," October 10, 2011, http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/computing-power,
accessed December 27, 2013.
Cognitive analytics
21

or certainty in their “correctness,” and adjusts
the strength of heuristics, intuition, or decision
frameworks based on direct feedback to
those ideas. Many of today’s implementations
represent supervised learning, where the
machine needs to be trained or taught by
humans. User feedback is given on the
quality of the conclusions, which the system
uses to tune its “thought process” and refine
future hypotheses.
Another important component of cognitive
computing is natural language processing
(NLP), or the ability to parse and understand
unstructured data and conversational requests.
NLP allows more data from more sources to
be included in an analysis—allowing raw text,
handwritten content, email, blog posts, mobile
and sensor data, voice transcriptions, and more
to be included as part of the learning. This
is essential, especially because the volume of
unstructured data is growing by 62 percent
each year6
and is expected to reach nine
times the volume of structured data by 2020.7
Instead of demanding that all information
be scrubbed, interpreted, and translated
into a common format, the hypothesis and
confidence engines actively learn associations
and the relative merits of various sources.
NLP can also simplify a person’s ability
to interact with cognitive systems. Instead
of forcing end users to learn querying or
programming languages, cognitive computing
allows spoken, natural exploration. Users
can ask, “What are the sales projections for
this quarter?” instead of writing complicated
lookups and joins against databases
and schemas.
Finally, cognitive computing depends
on increased processing power and storage
networks delivered at low costs. That’s because
it requires massively parallel processing,
which allows exploration of different sets of
data from different sources at the same time.
It also requires places where the massive
amounts of data can be continuously collected
and analyzed. Options include the cloud,
large appliances and high-end servers, and
distributed architectures that allow work to be
reduced and mapped to a large collection of
lower-end hardware.
All together now
Cognitive analytics is the application
of these technologies to enhance human
decisions. It takes advantage of cognitive
computing’s vast data-processing power and
adds channels for data collection (such as
sensing applications) and environmental
context to provide practical business insights.
If cognitive computing has changed the way
in which information is processed, cognitive
analytics is changing the way information
is applied.
The breakthrough could not have come
at a better time. As more human activity is
being expressed digitally, data forms continue
to evolve. Highly structured financial and
transactional data remain at the forefront of
many business applications, but the rise of
unstructured information in voice, images,
social channels, and video has created new
opportunities for businesses to understand the
world around them. For companies that want
to use this information for real-time decision
making, cognitive analytics is moving to center
stage. It is both a complement to inventorying,
cleansing, and curating ever-growing decision
sources and a means for machine learning at
Internet speed and cloud scale to automatically
discover new correlations and patterns.
Cognitive analytics is still in its early
stages, and it is by no means a replacement
for traditional information and analytics
programs. However, industries wrestling with
massive amounts of unstructured data or
struggling to meet growing demand for real-
time visibility should consider taking a look.
22

Coloring outside the lines
A multinational consumer goods company
wanted to evaluate new designs for its popular
men’s personal care product. The company had
sizeable market share, but its competitors were
consistently developing and marketing new
design features. To remain competitive, the
company wanted to understand which features
consumers valued.
Thousands of testers filled out surveys
regarding the company’s new product variant.
Although some of the survey’s results were
quantitative (“Rate this feature on a scale from
1–5”), many were qualitative free-form text
(“Other comments”). This produced more
text than could be processed, efficiently and
accurately, by humans.
The company used Luminoso’s text
analytics software to analyze the responses
by building a conceptual matrix of the
respondents’ text—mapping the raw content
onto subject and topic matters, statistical
relationships, and contexts that were relevant
to the business. Luminoso’s Insight Engine
identified notable elements and patterns
within the text, and measured the emotional
and perceived effects of the product’s design
and functionality.
The discoveries were impressive, and
surprising. The company rapidly identified
design features important to consumers, which
mapped closely to the numerical ratings testers
had assigned. Unexpectedly, the product’s color
strongly affected how emotionally attached
a tester was to his product. When writing
freely, testers frequently mentioned color’s
significance to the product experience—but
when faced with specific questions, testers
only spoke to the topic at hand. The company
also uncovered that the color findings
were mirrored in those testers who did not
specifically mention color.
The company, able to finally quantify
a color preference, conducted a study to
select the preferred one. The product is now
on the shelves of major supermarkets and
convenience stores—in a new color, selling
more units.
Intelligent personal assistants
Some of the building blocks of cognitive
analytics have found homes in our pockets
and purses. Intelligent personal assistants such
as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft
Cortana use natural language processing,
predictive analytics, machine learning, and
big data to provide personalized, seemingly
prescient service. These are examples of
complex technologies working together behind
a deceptively simple interface—allowing users
to quickly and easily find the information they
need through conversational commands and
contextual prompts based on location, activity,
and a user’s history.
Such programs are first steps toward
harnessing cognitive analytics for personal
enhanced decision making. For example,
Google Now can check your calendar to
determine that you have a dentist appointment,
or search your communication history to know
that you are seeing a movie—contextually
determining your destination.8
It can then
use GPS to determine your current location,
use Google Maps to check traffic conditions
and determine the best driving route, and
set a notification to let you know what time
you should leave. And these systems are only
getting better, because the programs can
also learn your behaviors and preferences
over time, leading to more accurate and
targeted information.
Cognitive analytics
23

Changing the world of health care
In 2011, WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health benefits companies, set out to design a
world-class, integrated health care ecosystem that would link data on physical, financial, worksite,
behavioral, and community health. By establishing a singular platform, WellPoint could enhance
its ability to collaborate, share information, automate processes, and manage analytics. To do this,
WellPoint needed an advanced solution, and therefore teamed with IBM to use the capabilities of
Watson—IBM’s cognitive computing system.
“We decided to integrate our health care ecosystem to help our care management associates
administer member benefits, while providing a seamless member experience and working to
reduce costs,” said Gail Borgatti Croall, SVP of Care Management at WellPoint. “Cognitive analytics
was important in creating a system that could drive effectiveness and efficiencies throughout our
business.”
Today, WellPoint uses cognitive analytics as a tool for utilization management:9
specifically,
in reviewing pre-authorization treatment requests—decisions that require knowledge of medical
science, patient history, and the prescribing doctor’s rationale, among other factors. With its ability
to read free-form textual information, Watson can synthesize huge amounts of data and create
hypotheses on how to respond to case requests. In fact, WellPoint already has “taught” its cognitive
engine to recognize medical policies and guidelines representing 54 percent of outpatient requests.
“It took us about a year to train our solution on our business, and the more we taught the faster
the Watson cognitive platform learned,” said Croall. “Now it’s familiar with a huge volume of clinical
information and professional literature. This reduces a significant amount of time needed for nurses
to track down and assess the variables when making a well-informed decision on an authorization
request.”
For each case reviewed, the system provides nurses with a recommendation and an overall
confidence and accuracy rating for that recommendation. In some outpatient cases, the system
already can auto-approve requests, reducing the timeframe for patient treatment recommendations
from 72 hours to near-real time. As the cognitive system develops its knowledge database, the
accuracy and confidence ratings will continue to rise, and the ability to approve greater numbers
and types of cases in real time becomes a reality.
Furthermore, nurses have experienced a 20 percent improvement in efficiency in specific work
flows due to the one-stop-shop nature of the integrated platform. The integrated platform will create
not only efficiency savings but also enable improvement in speed of response to provider requests.
WellPoint’s use of cognitive analytics for utilization management represents the tip of the
iceberg. Its integrated health care ecosystem is a multiyear journey that the company approaches
with iterative, small releases, keeping the effort on time and on budget. In the future, WellPoint may
look into how the system can support identification and stratification for clinical programs or many
other applications.
“We’d like to see how our system can support a more holistic, longitudinal patient record—for
example, integrating electronic medical record (EMR) data with claims, lab, and pharmacy data,”
said Croall. “We also see opportunities on the consumer side. Imagine using cognitive insights to
create an online, interactive model that helps you, as a patient, understand treatment options and
costs. We’ve barely scratched the surface with our cognitive analytics capabilities. It truly will change
the way we perform utilization management and case management services.”
24

Safeguarding the future—
Energy well spent
Each year, thousands of safety-related
events occur around the world at nuclear
power plants.10
The most severe events make
headlines because of disastrous consequences
including loss of life, environmental damage,
and economic cost. Curtiss-Wright, a product
manufacturer and service provider to the
aerospace, defense, oil and gas, and nuclear
energy industries, examines nuclear safety
event data to determine patterns. These
patterns can be used by energy clients to
determine what occurred during a power plant
event, understand the plant’s current status,
and anticipate future events.11
Curtiss-Wright is taking its analysis a step
further by developing an advanced analytics
solution. The foundation of this solution is
Saffron Technology’s cognitive computing
platform, a predictive intelligence system that
can recognize connections within disparate
data sets.12
By feeding this platform with
structured operational metrics and decades
of semi-structured nuclear event reporting,
the ability to foresee future issues and provide
response recommendations for evolving
situations is made possible.13
Ultimately,
Curtiss-Wright hopes to improve nuclear
safety by means of a solution that not only
enables energy companies to learn from the
past but also gives them the opportunity to
prepare for the future.
Cognitive analytics
25

In 2011, I was given the opportunity to lead
IBM’s Watson project and build a business
around it. I am passionate about the process
of “presentations to products to profits,” so this
endeavor really excited me. The first decision I
had to make was which markets and industries
we should enter. We wanted to focus on
information-intensive industries where multi-
structured data are important to driving better
decisions. Obvious choices such as insurance,
health care, telecom, and banking were
discussed. We chose to first focus
on health care: a multitrillion-dollar
industry in which our technology
could help improve the quality
of care delivered, drive toward
significant cost reduction, and
have a positive impact on
society. In 2012, we reduced
the footprint of our Watson
system—then the size of a
master bedroom—to a single
server and took our first
customer into production.
To be successful with cognitive
computing, companies should
be able to articulate how they
will make better decisions and drive
better outcomes. Companies will
struggle if they approach it from the
“technology in” angle instead of “business
out.” The technology is no doubt fundamental
but should be coupled with business domain
knowledge—understanding the industry,
learning the theoretical and practical experience
of the field, and learning the nuances around a
given problem set.
For example, in the health care industry, there
are three primary aspects that make Watson’s
solution scalable and repeatable. First, Watson
is being trained by medical professionals to
understand the context of the relevant health
area and can present information in a way that
is useful to clinicians. Second, when building the
tools and platform, we created a model that can
be reconfigured to apply to multiple functions
within the industry so that learnings from one
area can help accelerate mastery in related fields.
Third, the delivery structure is scalable—able to
tackle problems big or small. The more it learns
about the industry, the better its confidence in
responding to user questions or system queries
and the quicker it can be deployed against new
problems. With Watson for contact center, we
are targeting training the system for a new task
in six weeks with a goal of achieving business
“break even” in six months.
However, cognitive computing may not always
be the right solution. Sometimes businesses
should start with improving and enhancing
their existing analytics solutions. Companies
considering cognitive computing should select
appropriate use cases that will generate value
and have enough of a compelling roadmap and
potential to “starburst” into enough additional
scenarios to truly move the needle.
In terms of the talent needed to support
cognitive solutions, I liken this to the
early stages of the Internet and web page
development when people worried about the
lack of HTML developers. Ultimately, systems
arose to streamline the process and reduce
the skill set required. With Watson, we have
reduced the complexity required to do this
type of work by 10–15 times where we were
when we first started, and recent startups will
continue to drive the curve down. So less highly
specialized people will be able to complete more
complex tasks—PhDs and data scientists won’t
be the only ones capable of implementing
cognitive computing.
There are three things I consider important
for an effective cognitive computing solution:
C-suite buy-in to the vision of transforming
the business over a 3–5 year journey; relevant
use cases and roadmap that are likely to lead
to a compelling business outcome; and the
content and talent to drive the use case and
vision. If you approach a project purely from a
technology standpoint, the project will become
a science project, and you can’t expect it to
drive value.
My take
Manoj Saxena, general manager, Watson Solutions,
IBM
26

Rather than having a team of data
scientists creating algorithms to
understand a particular business issue,
cognitive analytics seeks to extract content,
embed it into semantic models, discover
hypotheses and interpret evidence, provide
potential insights—and then continuously
improve them. The data scientist’s job is
to empower the cognitive tool, providing
guidance, coaching, feedback, and new inputs
along the way. As a tool moves closer to being
able to replicate the human thought process,
answers come more promptly and with greater
consistency. Here are a few ways to get started:
• Start small. It’s possible to pilot and
prototype a cognitive analytics platform
at low cost and low risk of abandonment
using the cloud and open-source tools. A
few early successes and valuable insights
can make the learning phase also a
launch phase.
• Plant seeds. Analytics talent shortages
are exacerbated in the cognitive world.
The good news? Because the techniques
are so new, your competitors are likely
facing similar hurdles. Now is a good
time to invest in your next-generation
data scientists, anchored in refining and
harnessing cognitive techniques. And
remember, business domain experience
is as critical as data science. Cast a wide
net, and invest in developing the players
from each of the disciplines. Consider
crowdsourcing talent options for
initial forays.14
• Tools second. The tools are improving and
evolving at a rapid pace, so don’t agonize
over choices, and don’t overcommit to a
single vendor. Start with what you have,
supplement with open-source tools during
the early days, and continue to explore
the state of the possible as tools evolve
and consolidate.
• Context is king. Quick answers and
consistency depend on more than
processing power. They also depend on
context. By starting with deep information
for a particular sector, a cognitive
analytics platform can short-circuit the
learning curve and get to high-confidence
hypotheses quickly. That’s why the
machinery of cognitive computing—such
as Watson from IBM—is rolling out
sector by sector. Early applications involve
health care management and customer
service in banking and insurance. Decide
which domains to target and begin
working through a concept map—part
entity and explicit relationship exercise,
part understanding of influence and
subtle interactions.
• Don’t scuttle your analytics ship. Far from
making traditional approaches obsolete,
cognitive analytics simply provides another
layer—a potentially more powerful layer—
for understanding complexity and driving
real-time decisions. By tapping into broader
sets of unstructured data such as social
monitoring, deep demographics, and
economic indicators, cognitive analytics can
supplement traditional analytics with ever-
increasing accuracy and speed.
• Divide and conquer. Cognitive analytics
initiatives can be broken into smaller,
more accessible projects. Natural language
processing can be an extension of
visualization and other human-computer
interaction efforts. Unstructured data can
be tapped as a new signal in traditional
analytics efforts. Distributed computing and
cloud options for parallel processing of big
data don’t require machine learning to yield
new insights.
Where do you start?
Cognitive analytics
27

• Know which questions you’re asking. Even
modest initiatives need to be grounded in
a business “so what.” An analytics journey
should begin with questions, and the
application of cognitive analytics is no
exception. The difference, however, lies in
the kinds of answers you’re looking for.
When you need forward-looking insights
that enable confident responses, cognitive
analytics may be your best bet.
• Explore ideas from others. Look outside
your company and industry at what
others are doing to explore the state of the
possible. Interpret it in your own business
context to identify the state of the practical
and valuable.
Bottom line
As the demand for real-time support in business decision making intensifies, cognitive analytics
will likely move to the forefront in high-stakes sectors and functions: health care, financial services,
supply chain, customer relationship management, telecommunications, and cyber security. In some of
these areas, lagging response times can be a matter of life and death. In others, they simply represent
missed opportunities.
Cognitive analytics can help address some key challenges. It can improve prediction accuracy,
provide augmentation and scale to human cognition, and allow tasks to be performed more efficiently
(and automatically) via context-based suggestions. For organizations that want to improve their ability
to sense and respond, cognitive analytics offers a powerful way to bridge the gap between the promise
of big data and the reality of practical decision making.
Authors
Rajeev Ronanki, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Rajeev Ronanki is a leader in the areas of IT strategy, enterprise
architecture, cognitive architectures, cloud, mobile, and
analytics. He has a deep knowledge of US health insurance
business processes, operations, and technology, and has worked
extensively with transactional and analytic systems.
David Steier, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
David Steier is a director in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s US Human
Capital Practice in Actuarial, Risk and Advanced Analytics. He leads
the Deloitte Analytics Solutions group, whose goal is to build tools that
accelerate the sale and delivery of business analytics engagements.
28

Endnotes
1. Sam Roweis, “Boltzmann machines,” lecture notes, 1995, http://www.cs.nyu.
edu/~roweis/notes/boltz.pdf, accessed December 19, 2013.
2. Andrew Carlson, Justin Betteridge, Bryan Kisiel, Burr Settles, Estevam R. Hruschka Jr.,
and Tom M. Mitchell, “Toward an architecture for never-ending language learning,” http://
www.cs.cmu.edu/~acarlson/papers/carlson-aaai10.pdf, accessed December 19, 2013.
3. Tech Trends 2014 is an independent publication and has not been
authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc.
4. Robert D. Hof, “Deep learning,” MIT Technology Review, April 23, 2013, http://www.
technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513696/deep-learning/, accessed December 19, 2013.
5. For more information on AI, see Deloitte Consulting LLP,
Tech Trends 2014: Inspiring disruption, 2014, “Exponentials.”
6. HP Autonomy, Transitioning to a new era of human information, 2013, http://www.autonomy.
com/html/power/sem/index-human_information.html, accessed December 19, 2013.
7. Steven Hagan, “Big data, cloud computing, spatial databases,” Geospatial
World Forum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 25, 2012.
8. Google, “How Google Now works (iOS app),” https://support.google.com/
websearch/answer/2841497?hl=en, accessed January 7, 2014.
9. Utilization management is the case-by-case assessment of the appropriateness
of medical services against evidence-based quality guidelines.
10. Paul Hoffman, “Cognitive computing,” April 2013, slide 31, http://www.slideshare.net/paulhofmann/
automation-of-cognitive-thinking-associative-memories-saffron-technologies, accessed January 7, 2014.
11. Saffron Technology, “Big data exchange conference,” http://saffrontech.
com/event/big-data-exchange-2013/, accessed January 7, 2014.
12. Saffron Technology, “All source intelligence for anticipatory sensemaking,” http://saffrontech.com/
wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2013/01/Saffron-Executive-Summary-2013.pdf, accessed January 7, 2014.
13. Saffron Technology, “Big data requires cognitive computing for model-free machine
learning,” September 18, 2013, http://saffrontech.com/2013/09/18/big-data-requires-
cognitive-computing-for-model-free-machine-learning/, accessed January 7, 2014.
Cognitive analytics
29

Enterprise adoption of crowdsourcing can
allow specialized skills to be dynamically
sourced—from anyone, anywhere, as needed—
for everything from data entry and coding to
advanced analytics and product development.
The potential for disruptive impact on cost
alone could make early experimentation
worthwhile, but there are broader implications
for innovation in the enterprise.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy said
it well in 1990: “No matter who you are, most
of the smartest people work for someone else.”1
His intent was not defeatism; it was a rallying
cry to tap into the collective experience
and enthusiasm outside of organizational
boundaries. Today, enterprises are doing
just that: harnessing the crowd to help with
a wide mix of challenges, from menial tasks
and complex needs requiring specialized skill
sets to creative endeavors and even strategic
planning. The idea of open source talent2
via
crowdsourcing is becoming industrialized—
growing in scale, sophistication, and
importance as an alternative staffing model.
The goal is not just cost savings but also quick
access to specialized resources, the ability
to dynamically scale up (and down) around
workloads, and geographic coverage in quickly
changing markets.
Businesses have a rich history of trying
to tap into crowds, using consumer surveys,
focus groups, and experiential marketing to
provoke customer engagement. Product R&D,
in particular, has seen significant activity, with
open innovation campaigns launched by many
large companies, including 3M, BMW, General
Mills, and Stanley Black & Decker.3
More
recently, companies have moved to flatten
and rewire their structures, making it easier
for people within the organization to connect
with information and specialists to grow ideas
and solve pressing problems across a wide
spectrum of domains.
There’s a crowd for that
The business applications of crowdsourcing
run the gamut from simple tasks to complex
solutions. Below is a sampling of the categories
and emerging platforms for harnessing
the crowd.
• Simple, task-oriented crowdsourcing.
Companies need arms and legs to execute
simple, short, transactional units of work.
Language translation services, data entry,
photograph tagging, and transcription are
popular items that allow large workloads to
be split across remote workforces. Routine
tasks that require physical presence such
Industrialized crowdsourcing
Sometimes more is better
Enterprise adoption of the power of the crowd allows specialized skills to be
dynamically sourced from anyone, anywhere, and only as needed. Companies
can use the collective knowledge of the masses to help with tasks from data
entry and coding to advanced analytics and product development.
The potential for disruptive impact on cost alone likely makes early
experimentation worthwhile, but there are also broader implications for
innovation in the enterprise.
31

as performing store pricing checks, pulling
products during recalls, restocking retail
shelves, or serving as data collectors, also fit
into this category. Crowdsourcing platforms
such as Amazon’s Mechnical Turk, Gigwalk,
TaskRabbit, Elance, Field Agent, and Quri
fill this niche with an on-demand labor
force, often global, numbering in the
hundreds of thousands and performing
millions of jobs.4
The goal is not just low
costs but also speed and scale.
• Complex, experience-based
crowdsourcing. Complex tasks require
abstract thinking, specialized skill sets,
and sophisticated problem solving. The
crowd is typically made up of diverse,
qualified individuals, including software
engineers, data scientists, artists, designers,
management consultants, and hobbyists
with advanced academic degrees or
industry experience. Tasks typically
require not just scale but also creative
problem solving, with the goal of achieving
breakthroughs to old problems through
innovative thinking. Platforms for this
type of crowdsourcing include 10EQS,
crowdSPRING, Kaggle, oDesk, and Tongal.
• Open-ended, idea-generating
crowdsourcing. These applications involve
challenges oriented around invention,
idea generation, and product and brand
innovation. Breakthroughs may come
from specialists or, increasingly, from the
general public. The challenge becomes one
of provoking and harvesting that potential.
Corporations are increasingly entering
into partnerships with crowdsourcing
platforms in this space to focus their
efforts. Examples include General Electric’s
opening of its patent library to Quirky5
and Qualcomm’s Tricorder challenge with
the XPRIZE Foundation.6
IdeaConnection
and InnoCentive are other platforms in
this space.
• Funding, consumption, and contribution
crowdsourcing. Large enterprises
should be aware of three other models
of crowdsourcing that are gaining
momentum. The first is crowdfunding, in
which entrepreneurs solicit sponsorship
from the masses, looking for support or
capital to develop ideas, products, and
businesses. Indiegogo and Kickstarter
are two of many platforms in this space.
Collaborative consumption models have
also emerged, in which certain assets
are available “as a service” to the crowd.
Automobiles through Uber and lodging
through Airbnb are two examples. Finally,
we’re seeing platforms where the crowd
contributes ideas and information, sharing
knowledge that could be useful to others.
The open source software movement and
Wikipedia are based on this model. Other
more recent platforms include Crowdtap
and Sourcemap.
Battalion at the ready
How is this different from outsourcing or
temporary agencies that have been around
for decades? Industrialized crowdsourcing
providers leverage platforms that can match
buyers to a much broader base of sellers while
reducing many of the administrative hassles,
combining cloud, mobile, social, and web
technologies to create new marketplaces.
For location-based assignments, individuals
carry GPS-enabled devices that provide
on-the-spot data entry and performance
verification. Others may provide bidding
systems, processes for billing and payment
collection, performance monitoring, and
performance ratings. Platforms can provide
easy access to specialists from many walks
of life—professionals, freelancers, and
hobbyists—who have the motivation,
qualifications, and flexibility to create
innovative ideas and execute assignments
promptly. For temp agencies or outsourcers,
the talent pool is constrained by their rosters.
32

A sampling of crowdsourcing platforms
users Number of contributors in the community
350,000
134,200
30,000
5,419,582
jobs Number of completed projects
4,000,000
299
150
53,728
Sources: 1
Gigwalk, "Press information," http://gigwalk.com/press,
Odesk, "Odesk at a glance,"
https://www.odesk.com/info/about, accessed December 18, 2013; Odesk,
"Find work," https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/browse, accessed December
18, 2013. 3
Kaggle, "Solutions," http://www.kaggle.com/solutions/connect,
accessed December 18, 2013; Kaggle, "Active competitions,"
http://www.kaggle.com/competitions, accessed December 18, 2013.
4
Peter Diamandis, "Genius TV commercials at 1/100th the price,"
Huffington Post Blog, February 28, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
peter-diamandis/a-tongal-produced-ad-scor_b_2806396.html, accessed
December 18, 2013. 5
Quirky, "About Quirky," http://www.quirky.com/about,
Kickstarter, "Kickstarter stats,"
http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats, accessed December 18, 2013.
Tongal4
Collaborative
contests for
video production
founded 2008
Kaggle3
Competitions for
predictive modeling
and analytics
founded 2010
Gigwalk1
A mobile, flexible
workforce for
jobs in the field
founded 2011
oDesk2
A tool for hiring
and managing
remote freelancers
founded 2005
Quirky5
A product design
incubator and
marketplace
founded 2009
Kickstarter6
A global funding
platform for
creative projects
founded 2009
4,500,000
659,000
897,946
411
In crowdsourcing, the needle in the haystack
comes to you, with skills and interests aligned
with your ask.
Buyers can access large pools of people
in short order, typically at low transaction
costs—a few dollars per store visit or
pennies per photo tag, For free agents, these
assignments allow them to earn extra money
with fewer commitments and more flexibility
than traditional employment offers. And
individuals qualified for these projects are
often attracted by intrinsic rewards beyond just
money—prestige, competition, learning, or job
opportunities. Many crowdsourcing platforms
provide rewards or leaderboards, letting talent
be recognized as leaders in their fields.
Some of the more compelling results
come from harnessing the crowd via contests.
These can be offered for entertainment or
prestige by applying gamification7
techniques.
Alternatively, top talent can be invited to
compete on an assignment by offering financial
incentives for the more effective responses.
Sponsoring companies pay only for “winning”
solutions while gaining access to a wide range
of ideas. Talent has the freedom to select
projects that match its interests and ambitions
and is given a platform to showcase its work.
Colgate Speed Stick used this model to spark
a Super Bowl ad for the bargain-basement
price of $17,000, compared with nine-figure
investments associated with traditional
agencies.8
Allstate sponsored a competition in
which the crowd created a liability prediction
model that was 271 percent more accurate than
the original.9
Leading companies are blasting through
corporate walls with industrialized solutions
to reach broader crowds capable of generating
answers and executing tasks faster and more
cost effectively than employees. Companies
are also gaining access to niche, unproven
experience that might be hard to find and
retain in-house. And with the crowd, you pay
only for the task being completed.
The crowd is waiting and willing. How will
you put it to work?
33

Crowd wars: The
“fan”tom menace
In 2013, Kellogg’s Pringles teamed with
Lucasfilm’s Star Wars to launch “The Force
for Fun Project,” a Tongal-enabled contest
challenging consumers and fans to design
the next Pringles television commercial.10
By
engaging a crowdsourcing platform, Pringles
hoped to open its doors to access new ideas
and inspire fresh, fan-driven digital content
while generating millions of impressions.
The Force for Fun Project was staged
in three rounds, with a bonus “wild card”
round to identify additional finalists. First,
fans were invited to submit a 140-character
vision in the “ideas round.” The top five
ideas advanced to the “pitch round,” where
filmmakers could present a vision for a video
production based on one of the five ideas. The
winning pitches, as identified by Pringles and
Star Wars executives, advanced to the final
“video round,” receiving a production budget
to bring the pitch to life. In the final round,
seven finalists were selected for a chance to win
The Force for Fun Project grand prize, which
included a $25,000 cash prize and a national
television spot.
To drive additional buzz for the video
finalists, Pringles and Star Wars solicited
10 die-hard fans and bloggers to feature the
videos (with additional, behind-the-scenes
content) on their own social platforms.11
The six-month initiative generated over
1,000 idea submissions, 154 video pitches, over
1.5 million YouTube views, 6 million social
impressions, and over 111 million overall
impressions. Furthermore, the contest and
winning videos received media coverage across
mainstream media and digital outlets. On
September 24, 2013, the winning commercial
was broadcast to over 12 million viewers
during ABC’s series premiere of Marvel’s
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Civic crowdsourcing
As the budgets for civic organizations
continue to shrink, municipalities, nonprofits,
and other public organizations are reaching out
to the public through crowdsourcing, which
allows civic organizations to tap into their
constituents for tools and services at a fraction
of the cost of traditional sourcing approaches.
One example is the City of Chicago. After
Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed an executive
order making all non-private data available,
the city sought ideas for providing the data to
the public in a usable way.12
Targeting local
software engineers, hobbyists, and “hackers,”13
the city initiated a crowdsourcing effort that
yielded a number of app proposals, ranging
from a 311 service tracker to a tool displaying
real-time subway delays.
Another example is the Khan Academy,
a nonprofit organization that provides free
educational content online. It uses volunteers
to translate the website into different
languages—crowd-provided localization
services. A Spanish site was released in
September 2013, and videos have been
translated into more than a dozen languages.14
The City of Boston introduced the Citizens
Connect mobile app in 2008, encouraging
Bostonians to report problems ranging
from broken streetlights to missed trash
pickups. The reports are connected to the city
maintenance tracking system, allowing work
crews to be rapidly deployed to fix problems
as reports come in and alerting citizens
34

when work orders are resolved. Since the app
debuted, the number of reports has risen from
8,000 in 2009 to more than 150,000 in 2012.15
Have patents, will innovate
Product development and innovation can
take years for large companies to develop
from initial idea to an item available on
retail shelves. Start-up company Quirky is
challenging current wisdom by crowdsourcing
the product development process, shortening
the invention timeline of new products from
years to weeks.
In 2012, Quirky caught the attention of
GE when it launched 121 new products and
sold 2.3 million units.16
The compressed
development schedule impressed GE
leadership so much that the company
opened its patent library to the Quirky
community to enable development of new
consumer products.
Products developed by Quirky begin as
one of approximately 3,000 ideas submitted
weekly by the Quirky community. As ideas
are submitted, community members vote
for the ideas they like. Those with the most
votes are reviewed by industry specialists and
community members who select products
for production. During development, the
community influences the product roadmap
by voting on issues ranging from color and
price to engineering. With four products
completed,17
the Quirky and GE team plan
to release dozens more over the next five
years, with GE already providing $30 million
in funding.18
35

Crowding store shelves
Innovation is likely at an all-time high in the consumer products industry. Traditionally, new
initiatives and technologies took months, or even years, to implement. Today, the timeline can be
weeks. Consumer product companies and retailers are finding benefits in rapid experimentation to
keep up with the pace of change and stay on the leading edge of innovation.
A leading retailer chose to experiment with crowdsourcing to improve its data collection. It engaged
with Gigwalk—a company that taps into the general population to perform micro-tasks for enterprises.
Millions of “gigwalkers” use a mobile app that matches them with available jobs, or “gigs,” based on
their geographical area and skillset. Participants are then promptly paid for executing those tasks.
The company participated in a pilot program to investigate a hunch that stores were missing out on
sales because of out-of-stock products. The company set up a series of gigs to monitor and collect data
on the stocking of its stores’ displays. It was hoping that by collecting and analyzing this data it could
identify an opportunity to decrease lost sales.
The company wanted to use new technologies and techniques to tackle age-old industry challenges
around out-of-stocks. It started by defining customer scenarios and identifying the specific data
to be collected. The crowdsourced team would walk into more than a dozen stores twice a day and
identify the missing products. A team member could scroll through a list of the company’s products
on the mobile app, click the ones that were missing, and use the drag-and-drop menu to enter
product information.
The pilot went live a month after conception, but the first week yielded subpar results, with only a
21 percent task adoption rate among the available resources. So the company changed the way the gig
was constructed and how the crowd would be incentivized. For example, it realized the term “SKU” was
not well understood by many consumers; to aid comprehension, the company more clearly showcased
the data that was to be collected. In addition, the company adjusted the pricing structure to reward
“gigwalkers” for completing additional store audits. The new model also disclosed the goals and value
of the company’s crowdsourced data collection initiative. The changes proved to be powerful. In the
second week the adoption rate was 84 percent, and in the third and fourth weeks, the rate rose to
99 percent.
The crowdsourcing experiment enabled the retailer to create datasets around its products. By
creating a visual heat map, the company was able to view, store by store, which products were out of
stock throughout a day across its stores in the pilot group. It was also able to improve the internal
processes that corresponded to those products and reduce the number of out-of-stock items. The
company estimated it could save millions of dollars if the piloted process enhancements were
implemented in stores across the country. The retailer also created a geospatial map to identify routing
issues that might be contributing to out-of-stock items, and was able to make changes to its distribution
methodologies accordingly.
At a reasonable cost, and in a relatively short period, the company was able to use crowdsourcing
to collect data; glean insights about its products, brands, and distribution; and improve processes to
reduce its risk of lost sales.
36

CIOs have one of the hardest roles in business
today: They need to manage reliability,
performance, and security while simultaneously
guiding innovation and absorbing new
technologies. Talent is a massively limiting
factor—especially with regard to disruptive
technologies like data science. Along with other
techniques, crowdsourcing can offer a way to
address these challenges.
I see two primary areas where companies can
leverage the power of crowdsourcing. The first
is in the micro-task world, where a company
can create small pieces of work to outsource.
The second is in the engagement world,
where a company can use a crowdsourcing
platform for a defined role such as software
development. It’s easier to do the latter, but as
we atomize processes to smaller and smaller
tasks, there is no reason those cannot also be
outsourced. The dilemma emerges when you
get to mission-critical processes. Outsourcing
those can carry enormous risks, but it can also
provide incredible scalability. I predict that in
the next several years it will become more
common, with startups leading the charge and
larger organizations following suit to remain
competitive. In information-based industries,
this is likely to be crucial. Quirky, a consumer
packaged goods (CPG) startup, manages a
community of 500,000 inventors to submit
ideas. Airbnb leverages the crowd to supply
rooms for people to stay in.
Regardless of which approach you take, I believe
that crowdsourcing is here to stay. The number
of people online is projected to increase from
2.4 billion today19
to 5 billion by 2020.20
These
minds, armed with their ever-more-affordable
tablets of choice, will dramatically increase the
general availability of intellectual capital. And
the technologies and resources now exist for
virtually anyone to become skilled in anything
very quickly. So the question becomes, “How
will you adapt?”
The first step for the C-suite is to gain
awareness: Many executives I talk to are
unfamiliar with crowdsourcing. To CIOs who
think, “That’s interesting, but not for me,” I
would say that if you’re only looking for
innovation internally, you’ll likely find yourself in
trouble. There is too much happening outside
your company walls for you to risk ignoring
it, let alone not leveraging it. Consider the
newspaper business, which was disrupted
by Craigslist, or the music business,
which was disrupted by the iTunes®
application.21
Your business
counterparts should expect that
they will be disrupted even if
they don’t yet know in what
way. For this reason, I urge
traditional businesses to
figure out how to cannibalize
themselves, or someone
else likely will. Yes, there is
discomfort and risk involved,
but that can be mitigated, and
it is ultimately less dangerous
than your business failing.
When you tap into the crowd,
you sacrifice certainty for breadth
of creative input, but as long as the
crowd is large, you have the potential
for incredible results at fractional costs.
We’re entering a world where businesses
are either the disruptor or the disrupted, and
there is no middle ground. I believe that taking
advantage of trends like crowdsourcing can help
companies keep the upper hand.
My take
Salim Ismail, founding executive director and global ambassador,
Singularity University
37

Understanding how to use
crowdsourcing to help reach
organizational goals may not be intuitive, and
the range of potential projects and platforms
can add to the confusion, especially as you’re
educating your business counterparts. Data
security, privacy, and compliance risks may
be raised as roadblocks. That said, every
industry can find acceptable areas in which
to experiment, perhaps in unlikely places.
Goldcorp is a mining company that shared
its top-secret geological data with the crowd,
offering $500,000 for finding six million
ounces in untapped gold. This $500,000
investment yielded $3 billion in new gold in
one year.22
Tapping crowd power through an online
platform is a low-risk investment with
potentially high returns, but only if you choose
appropriate projects.
• Scope. Focus on a clear and specific
problem to solve—one that can be boiled
down to a question, task, or request with
measurable definitions of success. One of
the benefits of crowdsourcing comes from
garnering ideas that aren’t limited by your
organization’s preconceptions of how your
business or market works. The scope of a
task can require deep domain experience
but should not be dependent on your own
organization’s context.
• Focus on gaps in your organization’s
own abilities. Begin your search in areas
where your own talent gaps have held
back progress. What could you learn or
accomplish if you had affordable manpower
readily available? What complex problems
have confounded your people? What
solutions seem out of reach, no matter what
you try? These may be problems worth
pitching to a crowd that isn’t contaminated
by “what’s not possible.” Crowds are likely
to consider data or information that
insiders assume is irrelevant.
• Keep an open mind. Crowdsourcing is
rarely initially championed by a C-level
executive, but the CIO may be in a
position to help educate business leaders
on its potential. A broad perspective
across the enterprise, combined with an
open mind, may help CIOs recognize
unexpected applications that could
benefit the organization. Leaders should
foster a culture where appropriate
crowd experiments are encouraged
while minimizing security, privacy, and
compliance risks. Employees may feel
threatened by crowdsourcing, perceiving it
either as a “big brother” tactic or a means
to replace the existing workforce. Consider
making crowdsourcing a tool for your
employees. For example, the sales team
for a consumer goods company can use a
crowdsourcing app to harness cheap labor
to perform the mundane parts of their job.
By letting your employees orchestrate the
crowd, concerns can be alleviated.
• Get ready for what’s next. Crowdsourcing
is in the early stages, but it’s not too early
to consider long-term opportunities for
new ways to get work done. Could a native
mobile app that feeds directly into your
systems streamline field data collection
and reporting in the future? Could the
time come when it would make sense to
provide access to corporate assets to free
Where do you start?
38

agents? A crowdsourced labor pool will
become a legitimate component of many
organizations’ distributed workforce
strategy. Start thinking now about what
policies and processes need to be in
place. Incentive structures, performance
management, operating models, and
delivery models may, in some cases, need
to be redrawn. Use crowdsourcing as a
tangible example of the shift to social
business23
—allowing early experimentation
to make the case for more profound
investments and impacts.
Bottom line
Crowdsourcing is still in its early stages, but today’s online platforms are sophisticated enough to
provide substantial benefits in solving many kinds of problems. The potential for disruptive impact on
cost alone makes early experimentation worthwhile. More important are the broader implications for
innovation in the extended enterprise. Today you can expand your reach to engage talent to help with
a wide range of needs. It’s important that your organization has the ability to embrace new ideas that
may be generated by your crowdsourcing initiatives. That means industrializing not just for scale and
reach but also for outcome.
39

Endnotes
1. Rich Karlgaard, “How fast can you learn?” Forbes, November 9, 2007, http://www.
forbes.com/forbes/2007/1126/031.html, accessed December 19, 2013.
2. CIO Journal by Wall Street Journal, “The new meaning of ‘open source talent’,” September 24, 2013, http://
deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2013/09/24/the-new-meaning-of-open-source-talent/, accessed December 19, 2013.
3. IdeaConnection, “Corporate crowdsourcing,” http://www.ideaconnection.
com/crowdsourcing/, accessed December 19, 2013.
4. Caroline Winter, “Gigwalk does temp-worker hiring without job interviews,” Bloomberg
Business Week, June 24, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-24/gigwalk-
does-temp-worker-hiring-without-job-interviews, accessed December 19, 2013.
5. Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, The first five smart home appliances from Quirky and
GE’s Future-Store, November 4, 2013. http://gizmodo.com/the-first-five-smart-home-
appliances-from-quirky-and-ge-1451720808, accessed December 19, 2013.
6. Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, “Introducing the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE,”
http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/, accessed December 19, 2013.
8. Peter Diamandis, “A Tongal-produced ad scores a Super Bowl touchdown,”
Huffington Post, March 4, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-diamandis/a-
tongal-produced-ad-scor_b_2806396.html, accessed December 19, 2013.
Authors
Marcus Shingles, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Marcus Shingles is a leader in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s
Innovation group. He works with corporate executive
teams to better understand and plan for the opportunities
and threats associated with radical innovation driven by the
exponential pace of discovery, invention, and technology.
Jonathan Trichel, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Jonathan Trichel is chief innovation officer in the Strategy and Operations
practice, responsible for developing new products, services, processes,
and business models to drive commercial growth. He is also a trusted
advisor to executive teams on growing profitable customer relationships.
40

9. Kaggle, “Predicting liability for injury from car accidents,” http://www.kaggle.
com/solutions/casestudies/allstate, accessed December 19, 2013.
10. Tongal, “Project gallery,” http://tongal.com/sponsor/PringlesandStarWars, accessed January 7, 2014.
11. Kellogg’s, Pringles® and Star Wars™ reveal top seven fan-generated videos from
“The Force for Fun” promotion, May 7, 2013, http://newsroom.kelloggcompany.
com/2013-05-07-Pringles-And-Star-Wars-Reveal-Top-Seven-Fan-Generated-
Videos-From-The-Force-For-Fun-Promotion, accessed January 7, 2014.
12. City of Chicago, Mayor Emanuel expands open data on city portal with executive order, December 10, 2012,
http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2012/december_2012/
mayor_emanuel_expandsopendataoncityportalwithexecutiveorder.html, accessed January 7, 2014.
13. Ben Kesling, “Hackers called into civic duty,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2013, http://online.wsj.
com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324263404578613850076916028, accessed January 7, 2014.
14. Khan Academy, “FAQ: Is Khan Academy available in other languages?” http://
khanacademy.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/329337-is-khan-academy-
available-in-other-languages-, accessed January 7, 2014.
15. Peter Schworm and Matt Carroll, “Boston’s line for problems draws big following,” Boston Globe,
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/09/02/city-handling-surging-number-complaints-
whether-phone-web-app/8dwlf4OPZM0ndxYbpeYAOM/story.html, accessed January 16, 2014.
16. J.J. Colao, “Can a crowdsourcing invention company become ‘the best retailer in the world?’”
Forbes, May 27, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2013/05/09/can-a-crowdsourcing-
invention-company-become-the-best-retailer-in-the-world/, accessed January 7, 2014.
17. Quirky, “Quirky + GE,” http://www.quirky.com/shop/quirky-ge, accessed January 7, 2014.
18. Liz Stinson, “Quirky and GE partner to conquer the Internet of Things,” Wired,
November 19, 2013, http://www.wired.com/design/2013/11/how-ge-and-
quirky-want-to-smarten-up-your-home/, accessed January 7, 2014.
19. Internet World Stats, “Internet users in the world: Distribution by world regions—2012
Q2,” http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, accessed January 20, 2014.
20. Doug Gross, “Google boss: Entire world will be online by 2020,” CNN, April 15, 2013, http://
www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/tech/web/eric-schmidt-internet/, accessed January 20, 2014.
21. Tech Trends is an independent publication and has not been authorized,
sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple, Inc.
22. Peter Diamandis, How a $500K investment netted $3 billion in one year, February
13, 2013, http://www.xprize.org/blog/ceo-corner/2013/02/13/how-a-500k-
investment-netted-3-billion-in-one-year, accessed January 7, 2014.
41

Digital is at the heart of business—
reshaping customer interaction, rewiring
how work gets done, and potentially rewriting
the nature of competition in some markets.
Today’s digital technologies include mobile,
social, and the web, but wearables1
and
the Internet of Things could dramatically
expand the definition in the years ahead. The
underlying intent is simple: using technology
to design more compelling, personally
relevant, engrossing experiences that lead to
lasting, productive relationships, higher levels
of satisfaction, and new sources of revenue.
Driving digital engagement.
First stop: Sales and marketing
Tapping digital channels to advertise,
market, sell, and provide customer care is
far from new terrain for many companies.
Early efforts have focused on coverage and
consistency: Do I have a digital presence
where my customers are spending time?2
Do the various channels provide consistent
information, services, and brand experience?
Even as some companies struggle with these
foundational elements, customers expect new
levels of digital engagement.
Today’s markets demand intimacy and
synchronization across channels—providing
seamless, personalized experiences to
customers who are time-, place-, and context-
aware. Customers want to be able to connect
via mobile, web, call centers, kiosks, and
emerging technologies–and they expect the
experience to pick up where the last interaction
left off. Second-screening (providing
synchronized, complementary content
simultaneously across two channels) has
gained popularity in media and entertainment,
with other industries following suit. And it
doesn’t stop with digital. Sometimes dubbed
omnichannel, digital engagement also looks to
connect the digital experience with physical
interactions—in-store, on-site, and via
customer and field service personnel.
Digital engagement requires a commitment
to content as a discipline, backed by a
technical and operational backbone. This
backbone enables the rapid creation, delivery,
and curation of assets, personalized to the
individual according to location, activity,
historical behavior, and device or service.
This enables personally relevant and timely
interactions that are “just right” in their level of
detail, utility, and privacy.
For CIOs, many of the foundational moves
in digital engagement may be happening
outside of their direct control. Chief marketing
officers and newly minted chief digital officers
Digital engagement
Context + content for marketing . . . and beyond
Content and assets are increasingly digital—with audio, video, and interactive
elements—and consumed across multiple channels, including not only mobile,
social, and the web, but also in store, on location, or in the field. Whether
for customers, employees, or business partners, digital engagement is about
creating a consistent, compelling, and contextual way of personalizing,
delivering, and sometimes even monetizing the user’s overall experience—
especially as core products become augmented or replaced with digital
intellectual property.
Digital engagement
43

are likely defining the roadmap for big parts of
the digital backbone—content management,
web analytics, campaign management, search
engine optimization, email optimization, and
social listening. Realizing the full potential
may require hooks into customer relationship
management (CRM), sales force automation,
e-commerce, and back-office processes such
as order, inventory, pricing, and fulfillment
management—areas IT is well-prepared to
help drive. The CIO can also provide guidance
and stewardship for responsible adoption
of these digital technologies, preserving the
“-ities” of security, reliability, scalability,
interoperability, maintainability, and capacity.
Let’s get digital: New
products (and markets)
The implications of digital engagement
are even more interesting when you look
beyond sales and marketing. It is a universal
opportunity, regardless of whether a company’s
product or service assets are physical or digital.
But as more industries’ core products and
services are replaced or enhanced by digital
offerings, the same commitment to digital
content, asset, and intellectual property (IP)
management moves from marketing enabler to
strategic imperative.
The media and entertainment industry
has been leading this charge as a significant
percentage of revenue continues to move
from physical to digital channels across
the industry.3
Financial services, retail, and
health plans are also undergoing transitions
to digital. And with the advent of embedded
sensors and low-cost connectivity, life sciences,
consumer, and industrial products companies
are increasingly enhancing their core products
with digital services—from turbines to soft
drink dispensers to toys.
Pharmaceutical companies are creating
companion apps to support patients—
creating new value beyond the molecules
while inspiring brand loyalty. Ball bearing
manufacturers are including on-vehicle
The Hobby Shop tracks
John’s session, checks the
CRM system for purchase
history and family information,
and, with predictive analytics,
anticipates John’s potential
purchase for his
daughter.
The Hobby Shop
captures tweets
with the tag
#magicianskit.
Welcome, John.
magician’s kit
www.thehobbyshop.com
For John
from the
Hobby Shop
25%OFF
@JohnSmith
Need a
#magicianskit
for Jane's
bday present.
Digital engagement in action
@MarvelousMagicMax
@JohnSmith, hope the
birthday is magical!
The Hobby Shop
app recognizes
John’s proximity
to the store.
John uses his
smartphone while
walking through
the mall.
John uses the
coupon to purchase
a Marvelous Max
Coins & Cards
Magic Kit.
The Hobby Shop
emails John a receipt
and access to a
personalized magic
trick app. Try Max’s favorite
tricks from your new
Coins & Cards Kit:
Vanishing Coin
Floating
Spoon
Mind
Reading
Card Levitation
44

sensors to offer adjacent services for fleet
management and route optimization. After
impressive consumer adoption, fitness
trackers are being endorsed by health plans for
wellness programs. The broader “quantified
self” movement has brought new players
into hardware and software markets, from
consumer apparel companies to retailers. Users
are trading their personal information for
enhanced experiences, sometimes even paying
for the privilege.
Longer term, the progression of 3D
printing may cause a fundamental shift in
product strategy, bringing a rise in digital-
only products in these traditional industries.
When a spare part can be downloaded and
produced by customers themselves, effectively
protecting, managing, and monetizing the
underlying digital IP may become as critical as
managing any other product. At a minimum,
new approaches for managing digital assets
and rights will probably be needed. But the
implications may be far more disruptive—
requiring rewired sales structures and
incentives, reshaped channel partnerships, and
new ways to take orders, provision products,
monitor usage, bill, settle, service, and support.
The enterprise awaits
There is tremendous opportunity to
apply digital engagement principles within
the enterprise to reengineer how your own
employees interact, work, and grow. The same
digital backbone put in place for external
stakeholders can be used to drive internal
engagement across almost every process
and domain.4
Now is the time for CIOs to help their
businesses define a digital vision while
helping marketing integrate its activities
with those of sales and operations. Perhaps
more importantly, the CIO can secure IT’s
role in helping to drive the company-wide
transformation behind enterprise digital
adoption and in making a longer-term strategic
pivot from physical goods to digital services.
Digital engagement
45

Driving new savings,
sales, and loyalty
Many global brands have a legacy of
semi-autonomous regional marketing teams
delivering local solutions—an approach
that may not add up to a sum greater than
the parts. Instead, they may find themselves
paying for the same digital marketing services
in multiple regions to multiple agencies with
little to no economies of scale. The result
can be millions of dollars in duplicate spend,
an explosion of inconsistent websites, a
fragmented customer experience, and lost
opportunities to enrich engagement.
Recognizing that there was a better way,
one leading auto manufacturer created a cost-
savings business case for a new, global digital
marketing organization. The new organization
could potentially cut tens of millions of dollars
in avoidable spend by consolidating processes,
governance, and technology enablers and
by reducing the company’s dependence on
external agencies—all while retaining local
differentiation where needed.
The company’s global digital marketing
approach includes a unified customer
experience with regional variations, a
governance structure with the authority to
direct spending, and a transparent operating
model that brings the digital tools and services
to the business. With this new approach,
digital teams have the opportunity to focus on
more ways to engage customers rather than on
the daily blocking and tackling of managing
websites and e-mail campaigns.
Reimagining the
online experience
In 2010, Intel set out to completely
re-architect the existing Intel.com website—
hundreds of thousands of pages serving
millions of visitors each month—into a
consistent, dynamic, and highly relevant
digital experience. The effort focused on three
primary objectives: use powerful technology
with best-in-class capabilities, create an
engaging and innovative user experience,
and provide a scalable and stable publishing
process for the business and its vendors.
To create this new and distinctive digital
experience, Intel involved the lines of business,
marketers, IT staff, software consultants,
creative agencies, and specialty vendors. The
cross-functional team worked together to
build out the new system following an iterative
process with parallel development of user
experience, technical implementation, and
content creation, migration, and localization.
In less than a year, Intel was able to
provide a new online experience that has won
multiple user experience and design awards.
The company has also seen measurable
improvement in visitor ratings and satisfaction.
By dynamically delivering rich, relevant
content to visitors, Intel.com has seen a total
traffic increase of 67 percent per year, an
82 percent site satisfaction rating, and a 55
percent conversion rate of visitors clicking
through from Intel’s shop out to retailers and
OEMs. The solution has also resulted in a 50
percent reduction in publishing costs and
the ability to make content updates in hours
instead of weeks, allowing Intel to provide
a rich, relevant digital experience for its
customers, partners, and employees.
46

Calling all content
Rapid technological advancements such
as mobile and cloud, as well as consumer
demand for digital content across multiple
channels, are causing rapid changes to the
telecommunications landscape. Sensing the
positive disruption these changes could likely
have on its business, Verizon Communications
began exploring ways to monetize the
digital landscape.
Traditionally, the digital media supply
chain—the process by which digital content
(such as news clips, movies, and television
shows) is delivered to consumers—has been
decentralized across many vendors. When
digital content is produced, different entities
store, catalog, and distribute the content with
manual hand-offs between the companies.
With its infrastructure and network already
in place, Verizon built on the existing invest-
ments to provide an offering for digital content
for media and entertainment companies. As
a result, Verizon launched its Digital Media
Services division, providing customers with a
means to deliver content to consumers.
Digital engagement
47

The one-stop digital shop
Adobe, a global software company focused on creativity and digital marketing solutions, had
a product marketing website that was one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, with more
than 35 million unique visitors per week (75 million including download users). But the company
wasn’t capitalizing on its site traffic for online purchases, and instead directed customers to alternate
sources where they could purchase its products.
Adobe wanted to increase its online direct-to-consumer revenue by transforming its website
into a seamless product marketing and e-commerce site—one that would not only be functionally
richer, but also engage each customer. In the process, it also wanted to leverage its own digital
marketing capabilities, especially its online marketing analytics capabilities—which had been
bolstered through its acquisition of online marketing and analytics company Omniture—and its
digital experience capabilities, enhanced through its acquisition of Day Software. In parallel, Adobe
decided to undergo a strategic shift to move from its traditional model of selling boxed software to a
subscription-based, cloud-driven software model—a transformation that prepared the company to
be almost completely digital.
In pursuit of those goals, Adobe created an engaging, integrated marketing and e-commerce site
to showcase and sell its products. Personalized for each customer based on his or her navigation
profile and past purchases, it included a customized product carousel with relevant products for
each customer and a recommendation engine that allowed Adobe to push related promotions.
Responsive design allowed for a seamless experience across browser, tablet, and smartphone—
dynamically rendering high-definition visuals, video content, and contextual product and
promotion information based on the user’s profile and specific channel. And the site allowed
customers to explore Adobe’s subscription services, the Creative Cloud for digital media and the
Marketing Cloud for digital marketing, alongside traditional products—accelerating awareness and
adoption of the new products. The site was built using a combination of Adobe’s digital marketing
capabilities, including Experience Manager for Content Management, Test&Target for improving
site functionality, Recommendations for driving cross-sell and up-sell, and SiteCatalyst for driving
online analytics and reporting.
In addition to personalizing the customer experience, the website provided an intuitive
authoring environment for back-end management of content and workflow—simplifying the
process of updating the site and decreasing the time needed to make changes from weeks or months
to hours or days. Maintenance complexity dropped as the global page count dropped by 40 percent,
and marketing efficiency increased by 78 percent. The self-managed nature of the site also led to
decreased operational costs, as built-in intelligence drove promotions and offerings automatically,
saving time that would have otherwise been spent on manual intervention.
Adobe achieved significant results from its efforts around digital engagement. Its online revenue
has increased 39 percent since the project began three years ago—surpassing the $1 billion mark
in 2013. Checkout conversions increased 16 percent, with a 48 percent increase in lead conversion.
Revenue per visit increased on targeted content. But perhaps more importantly, Adobe transformed
its own digital presence into a leading example of how to put its tool set to use—showcasing the
opportunity for digital engagement at a time of dramatic innovation in sales and marketing.
48

Consumer technology has evolved significantly
in the last decade alone. When I first started
in the business at Facebook, we designed
products for one environment—the desktop
web browser. Today, we find ourselves fully
immersed in the post-PC era, where people
use technology throughout the day across a
growing combination of laptops, smartphones,
tablets, and other mobile devices. And the
number of devices that people need to access
their data will likely only escalate over time. So
it’s important for businesses to be design-centric
and maintain a deep appreciation for how their
products and services fit into the cadence of a
user’s daily life across different devices.
At Dropbox, we focus on how to make things
reliably simple for our users. People’s stuff
is commonly on the brink of disaster—hard
drives crash, devices are lost, and phones
are accidentally dropped and broken. Safe,
reliable online storage is a fundamental
building block of our service, but we have
ambitions far beyond mere backup. We want
to build software that makes people’s lives
more productive and memorable. I credit the
cofounders of Dropbox with being very design-
minded. Even in its earliest form, Dropbox
was an elegant product—a “magic folder” on
the desktop computer that was native to the
operating system environment people were
already familiar with.
The design organizations I’ve worked with
understand two things. First, in order for a
product to have global appeal, it should be
conceptually basic and universally intuitive.
Conceptual simplicity comes from a deeply
empathic and highly iterative approach to
design. Second, world-class experiences
require technical experience coupled with an
understanding of how a product fits into a
person’s day-to-day life. These two concepts
continue to grow in importance as we become
an increasingly connected society. Managing a
user’s attention and transferring context across
devices require a multidisciplinary approach to
exploration and prototyping.
It is also important for business leaders to
understand that great design doesn’t happen on
the first try, or even on the tenth try. Designers
should get in front of consumers, field-test
their prototypes, and relentlessly iterate on
their work in order to achieve perfection. As
products have increasing amounts of access
to personal data about their users—names,
locations, interests, the people they work and
socialize with—software makers have a
powerful opportunity to personalize
product experiences in ways that
were previously impossible. We
can “roll out the red carpet” and
offer a singular experience that
makes our customers feel as
if the product or service was
handmade for them. The
true potential of digital
engagement is creating
experiences rich with empathy
and context across multiple
touch points—driving
customers from being users to
loyal advocates.
Simple, elegant, and intuitive
design can be a competitive
edge for a business, and it begins
with executive leadership buy-in, an
uncompromising focus on hiring top
talent, and a cultural commitment to great
design. When designed accordingly, digital
engagement can provide seamless, accessible,
personalized solutions for customers.
My take
Soleio Cuervo, head of design,
Dropbox
Digital engagement
49

Many companies have content
management systems to support certain
types of information on the web, but few have
gone beyond that to tackle the broader range
of digital content. That’s likely because they’re
looking at content the wrong way. Content is
still isolated or tied to specific business units
or geographies when it should be anchored to
a customer or product. Complicating matters,
the volume of content is out of control—
especially with the rise of big data signals.
Even the fundamentals need attention. Many
companies lack processes and systems to
understand the real costs of their activities,
and they have no easy way to know which
content elements are current, which should be
retired, and how they should come together to
support business operations. Some companies
use third parties to maintain and manage their
digital content, thereby delegating what may
have easily become a source of competitive
advantage. The potential scope is huge, but in
practice, attention should be focused on five
specific areas:
• Web, mobile, and social content
enablement. Digital engagement should
be seamless across channels. Achieving
this will likely require responsive design
and digital content that can be dynamically
rendered and delivered based on the end
user’s context—in different formats, with
varying granularity, and with different
actions exposed. Day-parting, behavioral
analytics, and social activation5
are
parts of this drive toward context-rich
personalization. As Yahoo! CEO Marissa
Mayer said, “The ultimate search is the
one where you’re the query”—taking into
account your history and preferences.6
That
starts with a robust content backbone—
technically and operationally.
• Self-service and governance. Centralizing
digital content management can enable
more efficient and effective communication.
Which tools, skills, and resources are
needed to allow the business to create,
deliver, and curate the content its customers
and other stakeholders need? Managing
the platform and campaigns at the
core—while allowing for personalization
and activation on the edge—enables a
mix of global control and localization.
Some organizations are looking to build
in-house digital supply chains to manage
the full lifecycle of web, mobile, social, and
on-premise content, allowing real-time
experimentation and responsiveness.
• Ease of access. Instead of holding
content captive in a particular repository,
unlock it. Make content easily accessible
across multiple channels, countries, and
stakeholders—potentially including
customers and enthusiasts.
• Digital IP and asset management. What
information assets are you managing?
Who controls them? Where are the assets
located? How are they protected today? Are
there plans to monetize them? Do you have
the resources needed to edit and improve
them? Which parts of your business will
become digital in the next two years? What
competencies and practices should be put
into place to make that happen? How do
you manage rights for IP usage across and
beyond the enterprise? What new revenue
streams are possible?
• Cost reduction. Take time to inventory
digital content across the enterprise. At
what rate is new content being developed,
and how does it break out by function?
Streamlining the distribution and
management of digital content, regardless
of where it resides, is the first step toward
containing costs.
Where do you start?
50

Bottom line
Digital engagement is a way to drive new investments in marketing, similar to those that have
improved finance, supply chain, and customer relationship management over the past few decades.
Beyond efficiency and cost savings, digital engagement presents new ways to enhance customer
loyalty and competitive advantage—riding the wave of changing behaviors and preferences for
contextual interactions. Organizations should “think Big Mother (relevant, useful services) rather
than Big Brother (omnipresent, creepy intrusions).”7
And with more parts of the business becoming
digital, the CIO has the opportunity to build a new legacy for IT—a responsive, forward-looking
organization, an enabler of innovation, and a driver of digital engagement.
Digital engagement
51

Authors
Christine Cutten, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
As a leader within Deloitte’s Customer Transformation practice, Christine
Cutten helps companies reach and connect with customers, build brands,
and grow the bottom line. In her 10-year tenure with Deloitte, Cutten has
helped many CMOs rethink their marketing strategies and operations.
Barbara Venneman, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
As the national digital content leader within Deloitte Digital,
Barbara Venneman leads a team of talented practitioners that
helps clients establish digital strategies, operational models,
processes, and emerging technologies to deliver business results.
52

Endnotes
2. Note: In 2013, this became predominantly digital; for the first time, US adults spent more time
online and on mobile devices than consuming TV, radio, or print (Source: Emarketer, “Digital set to
surpass TV in time spent with US media,” http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Set-Surpass-
TV-Time-Spent-with-US-Media/1010096#cS7GHCclhaKGYp0k.99, accessed December 19, 2013.
3. Deloitte Development LLC, 2014 outlook on media and entertainment: Interview with
Gerald Belson, http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Industries/industry-outlook/9ce
d365249afa310VgnVCM3000003456f70aRCRD.htm, accessed December 31, 2013.
6. Anthony Ha, “Marissa Mayer says that she won’t read this,” TechCrunch, September 24, 2013, http://
techcrunch.com/2013/09/24/marissa-mayer-wont-read-this/, accessed December 19, 2013.
7. Sarah Rotman Epps, “Smart marketing in a sensor-laden world,” Forbes,
April 18, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2013/04/18/smart-
marketing-in-a-sensor-laden-world/, accessed December 19, 2013.
Digital engagement
53

Wearable computing technology,
dating to the 1960s’ helicopter pilot
head-mounted displays, is not new.1
Even the
familiar office identification badge is a type
of wearable. But with recent materials science
advances driving technology miniaturization
and battery improvements, we’re standing on
the brink of widespread adoption.
Wearables are devices worn on the body
in items such as watches, glasses, jewelry,
and accessories. Or in the body—ingested or
surgically implanted. They consist of three
modular components: sensors, displays, and
computing architecture. A wearable device
may include one, two, or all three functions. A
smart watch may contain narrowly purposed
sensors that gather data about the user and his
or her environment, but it may have limited
display functionality and no computing power.
Computing may occur in the cloud or on a
multipurpose device such as a smartphone.
The display may be on a nearby screen or in
a pair of smart glasses, or it may even use an
earbud or pendant for verbal response.2
Think
of wearables as an ecosystem—expanding
capabilities that are individually interesting
but more compelling when combinations
are harnessed. This modularity is allowing
new manufacturers to enter the market,
driving demand from both consumers and
enterprise users.
The mobile revolution placed powerful,
general-purpose computing in our hands,
enabling users to take actions in the digital
world while moving about in the physical
world. By contrast, wearable technology
surrounds us with devices that primarily
enable other devices with digital information,
which in turn support us in taking
real-world actions.
So why move forward now?
Few enterprises have tapped the full
potential of smartphones and tablets, and
many IT organizations are still learning how
to design and build elegant, intuitive mobile
apps. Also, the enabling infrastructure required
to secure, deploy, manage, and maintain
mobile assets is still being developed.3
And
many industries are just learning how to think
beyond today’s business scenarios: how to,
instead of veneering existing processes and
systems, come up with new ideas and even
business models that were not previously
possible. With so many opportunities left to
explore using conventional mobile devices—
smartphones, tablets, and laptops—why
Wearables
On-body computing devices are ready for business
Wearable computing has many forms, such as glasses, watches, smart
badges, and bracelets. The potential is tremendous: hands-free, heads-
up technology to reshape how work gets done, how decisions are
made, and how you engage with employees, customers, and partners.
Wearables introduce technology to previously prohibitive scenarios where
safety, logistics, or even etiquette constrained the usage of laptops and
smartphones. While consumer wearables are in the spotlight today, we
expect business to drive acceptance and transformative use cases.
Wearables
55

should business leaders consider another wave
of investment?
Wearables’ value comes from introducing
technology into previously prohibitive
environments—where safety, logistics, or
even etiquette have constrained traditional
technology solutions. Wearables can be the
first seamless way to enable workers with
digital information—especially where hands-
free utility offers a clear advantage. For
example, using wearables, workers in harsh
environmental conditions can access data
without removing gloves or create records
without having to commit data to memory and
then moving to a sheltered workstation.
The primary goal of wearables is to enable
users to take real-world actions by providing
relevant, contextual information precisely at
the point of decision making. Wearables shine
in scenarios where using a laptop, phone,
tablet, or other conventional device may not
be appropriate4
as well as in making use of
the data gathered by sensors. Meeting this
goal requires generating data in real time and
intelligently pushing it to a device or devices
according to the user’s current context—
just-in-time digital logistics. These use cases
suggest that wearables may be most valuable
deep in an organization’s operations, rather
than in customer-facing applications.
Making sense of sensing
Wearables can also form a bridge to
related disciplines. Augmented reality (AR),
for instance, overlays digital information
onto the real world. Many smart glasses
scenarios feature AR concepts, and overlaying
reference images and graphics can be a
powerful enhancement to wearables. Likewise,
the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the
explosion of devices with connectivity and—
potentially—intelligence. Be they motors,
clothes on a retailer’s shelves, thermostats,
or HVAC ducts, IoT is rapidly adding to the
context map that will amplify wearables’
impact.
Sensors permeate the Internet of Things
and are a leading focus of consumer wearables.
This is especially true in the “quantified self”
movement in which bracelets can gather
personal data or sports gear and clothing
can help monitor health. Consumer-facing
enterprise applications, such as beacons that
affect the behavior of wearable displays or
smartphone apps, rely on consumers being
surrounded by a network of always-on sensors.
Corporate uses of sensors may include
temperature readings of an employee’s
environment or sleepiness indicators for fleet
drivers. These sensors are not necessarily smart
by themselves; rather, they harvest data that is
processed and displayed elsewhere.
Going to work
The potential uses for wearables are
staggering. In Australia, firefighters are being
outfitted with a data-transmitting pill that
can detect early signs of heat stress.5
Health
care insurance companies may offer policy
discounts for members who quantify their
healthy lifestyles by wearing fitness-tracking
devices, similar to auto insurance companies’
in-car efforts to track safe driving habits.6
On the manufacturing floor, workers may be
able to view metrics for nearby equipment on
a smart watch. AR overlays in a warehouse
can guide a worker who needs to find, move,
pick, pack, and ship a particular product.
Field installation, service, and maintenance
professionals are being outfitted with smart
glasses to access documentation, procedural
tips, and skilled advice—from the top of a cell
tower or beneath a boiler.7
Similar potential exists on the consumer
side; Gartner predicts that “the worldwide
revenue from wearable electronic devices,
apps, and services for fitness and personal
health is anticipated to be $1.6 billion in
2013 increasing to $5 billion by 2016.”8
But
the market is—and will likely continue to
be—highly fragmented. This fragmentation is
inherent in a modular ecosystem, reflecting the
lack of widely adopted technology standards.
56

Design principles of wearables
content
Ascribe to (much)
“less is more” for
content and its
delivery—the
design facilitates
exceptionally low
duration, high
frequency use.
communication
Focus on
communicating
rather than simply
displaying data—
not necessarily
visually, and not
necessarily via the
device generating
the notiﬁcation.
intention
Use persistent
design elements,
alerts, just-in-time
information, and
notiﬁcations with
discretion.
influence
Do not force
new behavior,
but allow users
to adjust their
future behavior
by providing new
information or
capabilities.
intelligence
Are fueled largely
by intelligence
from analytics,
big data, and
sensors, which are
often embedded
in other devices.
interaction
Are careful about
requiring response
from the user—
interaction with
the device should
be minimal and
expedite the user’s
manual actions.
enhancement
Leverage the
digital world to
enhance the user’s
behaviors, actions,
and experiences
in the real world.
network
Communicate
with an expanding
community of
wearables, data,
devices, systems,
platforms, services,
and software.
More than two dozen manufacturers are
aggressively pursuing head-mounted smart
glasses. A dozen smart watches are already in
the market. And new devices are launching
virtually every day—from sensor-rich socks9
to
Bluetooth-powered rings to digital tattoos.10
Luckily, although the lack of industry
standards in wearables can lead to policy
headaches, a number of uses for wearables
can be enabled using tools and governance
processes similar to those needed for
smartphones and tablets: device management,
identity and entitlement management, security
policies, content management, and app
provisioning. Privacy concerns need to be
managed—even though wearables are likely
to be more readily accepted in the workplace
than in public situations. It’s important that
employees perceive that the tool will help them
perform more effectively on the job. Over time,
social and workplace tolerance may increase,
but during these early days, acceptance is a
factor that must be considered.
But enterprises should not wait for
consumer markets to settle and conventions
to be established. Because the wearables
ecosystem can benefit from the proliferation
of niche players, companies don’t need to
hold off until marketplace standards or
leaders emerge. The door is open to early
experimentation—and to usher in the next
wave of mobile innovation.
Wearables
57

The doctor is in (your stomach)
For millions of patients with chronic
illness, remembering to take a daily dose of
medicine can be a difficult task. According to
the World Health Organization, approximately
50 percent of patients fail to take medicine
correctly and more than 50 percent of
medicines are prescribed, dispensed, or sold
inappropriately.11
This may cause doctors to
over-prescribe medicine if they do not see the
expected results.
Proteus Digital Health has developed a
system that includes both a body-worn patch
and a small ingestible sensor that supports
patients in tracking their medicine usage
and health.12
The ingestible sensor can be
embedded into a pill or tablet and consumed
with a patient’s prescription. It works like a
potato battery—dissolving in the stomach to
activate. The ingestible sensor communicates
with the patch, which in turn transmits the
ingestion data, along with activity and rest
patterns picked up by the patch, to a secure
application that can be accessed from a
smartphone, tablet, or PC.13
With the patient’s
consent, the data can be automatically shared
with health care providers, family members, or
other caregivers.
Wearable wardrobe
2013 saw an explosion of wearable devices
in consumer products, with the “quantified
self” movement leading the charge. Fitness and
activity tracking devices are predicted to top
$1 billion in sales in 2014.14
Athletic consumer
apparel brands such as Nike, Adidas, and
Under Armour have either launched wearable
technology products or publicly shared plans
to enter the market.15
The trend is being embraced in the broader
fashion and consumer goods industries, with a
wide range of emerging categories. Heapsylon
manufactures Sensoria smart socks, which
track how much a user is exercising. The
company has plans to expand the platform to
help prevent and manage falls and foot injuries
and to collect information that health care
professionals can use to provide better-quality
care.16
Reebok’s CheckLight beanie measures
the intensity of blows to the heads of athletes
participating in contact sports, sending an alert
when a blow is moderate or severe.17
Huggies
announced prototype sensor-laden diapers
that can tweet parents when their infants
need to be changed.18
And more products are
coming, as demonstrated by the high number
of wearables on display at the 2014 Consumer
Electronics Show.
Hands-free patient care
Philips Healthcare brought wearable
technology to the operating table through
its proof of concept for using a hands-free
device to improve the efficiency of surgical
procedures. A surgeon typically reviews
numerous screens to monitor a patient,
requiring the surgeon to turn away from
the procedure at hand. Now, by wearing a
headset with a display in the field of vision,
a surgeon can monitor required information
while keeping both eyes on the patient. The
prototype allows doctors to interact with an
application derived from Philips’ IntelliVue
Solutions.19
Using simple voice commands, a
surgeon can request to view a patient’s vital
signs or medical history, which then would be
displayed in the surgeon’s line of sight.
Additionally, by giving doctors the ability to
observe a patient’s vital signs remotely, Philips’
58

prototype allows doctors to virtually be in
two places at once. For example, if a doctor
performing a routine procedure were called
upon to assist with another patient, he or she
could review the vital signs of both patients to
determine the more critical need.20
Other companies are also exploring the
possibilities of wearables in health care.
Shimmer, a provider of wearable wireless
health sensor products, is teaming with
research enterprises. Sample use cases include
remote monitoring of epileptic seizures and
the delivery of biofeedback during resistance
training activities.21
Additionally, an Ohio State
University Medical Center doctor recently
used a head-mounted device to perform
surgery. The device gave medical students the
opportunity to watch the surgery in real time
from a classroom and allowed the surgeon
to communicate with an off-site specialist
while operating.22
A new vision for training23
CraneMorley, a boutique design firm, creates tools for learning and performance support. Working
extensively with clients in the automotive industry, the company has been leveraging technology more
and more to drive business performance by creating solutions that target gaps in workers’ knowledge
and skills.
At a car dealership, salespeople should be well versed in the technology and telematics their cars
are equipped with to effectively sell them to their customers. If a salesperson can’t demonstrate a car’s
features, there is a good chance the customer won’t buy the car; on the flip side, if the salesperson can
demonstrate the technology seamlessly, the customer could love and buy the car and become a long-
term advocate of the brand.
Rather than overloading salespeople with information about the cars, CraneMorley designed
training workshops to interactively teach them what they need to know about cars’ telematics and
technology features. Twenty-five salespeople were equipped with tablets and placed around six cars.
They established their competency in demonstrating the car’s technology features, and if they struggled
with one, they could watch a quick lesson on their tablet for help. The instructors were able to see
a master view of the salespeople’s tablet programs, and could also insert themselves to help them
as required.
The program worked wonderfully—except that the salespeople had to hold the tablets while working
through the demonstrations. Identifying an opportunity to pilot wearable technology, CraneMorley has
developed a discovery learning training program using smart glasses. Through the use of the glasses,
the salespeople are now able to interact with the cars while information is overlaid on the hands-free
glasses by the augmented reality software. The ability to actively demonstrate the car’s features allows
the salespeople to better remember how to do it again in front of a customer at the dealership.
CraneMorley is exploring other scenarios to expand the smart glasses-powered discovery learning
concept beyond training salespeople. One application for the technology could be servicing: As
someone is trying to fix a car, he or she could access helpful information or contact an engineer for
real-time support—allowing the specialist to see exactly what the technician is seeing in the repair bay
and offer immediate guidance. Another application is on the sales floor: Many technologies have been
deployed to the sales floor to help customers learn more about cars’ features, such as kiosks, PCs, and
tablets, but none have really been effective. Smart glasses could be a tool to teach customers about the
cars that interest them in a more personal way, even allowing them to test drive a car without leaving
the dealer’s floor.
Wearables
59

At APX Labs, we are dedicated to changing the
way people use wearable displays, specifically
through the use of smart glasses. This new
class of devices can provide people with
relevant information to achieve tasks hands-
free. In the United States, there are 17 million
“desk-less” workers—people whose jobs take
them away from offices and cubicles into the
heart of where business gets done. Think
manufacturing, logistics, service technicians,
or medical professions. This alone is
a $20 billion market for wearable
technology—and only a part of the
bigger opportunity.
Wearables are a crowded, and
growing, ecosystem. We’ve
focused on building a platform
to lower the barrier of entry
for users across multiple
markets and form factors
of smart glasses. We see
the market in two broad
categories: heads-up displays
(HUDs) and true augmented
reality glasses—both of which
act as new tools to solve
old problems.
With heads-up displays, contextually
relevant information is presented via
an accessible, but secondary, out-of-eye
display. Think Kopin Golden-i and Google
Glass. Status, workflow, and supplemental
data look-ups are dominating early uses, but
more are coming as the development kits have
become generally available.
With augmented reality displays, smart glasses
are used to present real-time information and
services in the user’s view of the world—ideal
for the heads-up, hands-free worker. One of our
first applications was for the defense industry.
“Terminator Vision” was an effective initial use
case—using facial recognition and background
check services to visually highlight potentially
hostile parties as a soldier scans a crowd.
Medical use cases are also leading the charge—
with the goal of giving practitioners a view of
vital signs, electronic health records, procedural
guidance, and simple administrative support.
Applications for manufacturing, logistics, and
in-stadium entertainment are targets for future
adoption where large numbers of people are
engaged in similar tasks that require access
to the same information. More important,
companies control and operate the ecosystem
surrounding the business processes—simplifying
funding and integration challenges.
As the wearables market begins to take off,
there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon
playing out. In the consumer space, developers
won’t get behind a new platform unless there is
a substantial market for it, and users have been
hesitant to enter the wearables market before
there is a defined use case for the product,
which is dependent on compelling apps. This is
the driving reason that we think enterprises are
going to lead the charge—tackling well-defined
problems to drive the required volumes to
propel developers to opt in en masse.
But we’re still in the early days. Some enterprise
customers flock to the technology simply
because it’s “cool”—and then try to determine
what they can use it for. A better path is for
companies to holistically look at the business
issues they face, evaluate their options, and
determine if smart glasses are the required tool
for solving specific problems. We try to help our
customers identify what some of those burning
issues are—and figure out how the technology
will revolutionize the world around us.
My take
Brian Ballard, CEO,
APX Labs
60

We expect to see an escalating number
of wearable computing devices,
platforms, and applications that can enable
and transform business operations. Now is the
time to begin exploring the possibilities that
wearables hold for improving supply chains,
workflows, and processes to drive down costs
and increase competitiveness.
• Imagine “what if.” Think about how your
business’s effectiveness could improve if
workers had the information they needed at
the moment they needed it. What current
processes could be discarded or refined?
What could people accomplish if a photo or
video could replace a paper report? What
critical processes—for example, emergency
procedures—are difficult for workers to
master because they are rarely needed?
What if employees could have specific
instructions for those procedures delivered
at the point of impact? What if a worker
had ready access to equipment manuals
while repairing an oil rig or bridge cable?
What if a worker in the field could show a
remote colleague real-time video from his
or her point of view—while leaving his or
her hands free?
• Kick the tires. As new wearable devices and
software applications appear, experiment
with various platforms and evaluate the
organizations behind them. Do they fit your
business operations? Is the vendor viable
for the long term? Do you have a pool of
early adopters who will likely embrace the
technology? Remember that wearables
are a modular ecosystem, so if one
component doesn’t measure up, the system
can adapt to accommodate other players.
Experimentation is the name of the game.
• Become an early adopter. Connect with
wearable manufacturers and software
developers to share your business’s
operational needs and explore the
possibilities of working together to develop
solutions. As companies are looking for
beachheads in this new world, there are
opportunities for teaming.
• Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. In design,
wearables need to be treated as their own
beast. Just as the design patterns from
desktop, laptop, and the web were not
well-suited for smartphone and tablet use,
a completely different experience should
be designed for wearables. Simplicity
is the ultimate form of sophistication,
and transparency is the ultimate form of
simplicity. User interaction should be kept
to a minimum. If a use case requires an
explicit user response, it should be limited
to spoken commands, gestures, or a gloved
knuckle tap. Minuscule displays require
discipline in not only what information
should be displayed but how to present
it; a two-tone simplified graphic can be
more effective than a detailed photo. Time
sensitivity becomes important, so create
“glanceable” awareness of information in
the applicable context. The information
displayed should be curated to precisely
fit the immediate situation or task, with
no extraneous data. This extends to
the purpose for which a device is used:
Don’t design a wearable experience for a
function that’s more effectively done on a
smartphone, a tablet, or a piece of paper.
• Anticipate data and device management.
Data generated by wearable devices could
exponentially increase the quantity of
Where do you start?
Wearables
61

information that your IT organization
should store, manage, and analyze. The
volume of unstructured data, including
pictures and videos, could also escalate.
Also, consider how these new devices
will be repaired and managed. Assume
that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) will
happen whether policy supports it or not
and that new classes of devices will likely
become smart before IT can redefine
policies to manage them individually. Strive
for simple rules that can govern ever-
more-complex behaviors.
• Engage the workforce. Ask frontline
employees to participate in the imagination
process. What persistent problems would
they like to solve? What opportunities
could be created? Likewise, ask them what
concerns they have about the devices, and
develop plans to address those concerns.
Talk with trade unions and other worker
groups to understand and address concerns
they may have about using wearable
devices. Over time, social and workplace
tolerance may increase, but during these
early days, focus on employee education
and constrain your use cases to those that
provide demonstrable benefits to the user.
Bottom line
Wearables targeted at the consumer market are today’s media darlings. Google Glass Explorer
parties and Samsung’s Dick Tracy-style watches make for interesting copy. But unlike tablets, which
were introduced to the enterprise by consumers, we expect businesses to take the lead in building
acceptance and demand for wearable computing devices. As consumer devices, wearables represent
a very personal buying decision in which aesthetics and fashion are almost as important as function.
But in the workplace, experience and engagement matter. Function can trump form—as long as a
wearable is perceived as unobtrusive, safe, and not “creepy.” The challenge is easy to articulate: Rethink
how work could get done with the aid of an ever-present computing device that delivers the desired
information when it’s needed. Organizations that get a head start could gain an advantage over their
wait-and-see competitors.
62

Authors
Shehryar Khan, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
As the mobile lead for the Deloitte Digital service line,
Shehryar Khan focuses on helping clients use mobile to drive
organizational transformation—identifying opportunities where
mobile can truly impact both user and business goals.
Evangeline Marzec, specialist master, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Evangeline Marzec is a specialist master in mobile strategy at Deloitte
Digital. Her focus is on the rapid analysis of mobile opportunities and
threats for clients across all verticals and on creating frameworks for
understanding the impact of emerging technologies on business models.
Endnotes
1. MIT Media Lab, “A brief history of wearable computing,” http://www.media.
mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/timeline.html, accessed January 6, 2014.
2. Ken Hess, “What’s better than Siri or Google Maps? XOWi is,” ZDNet, November 4, 2013, http://www.
zdnet.com/whats-better-than-siri-or-google-maps-xowi-is-7000022765/, accessed December 19, 2013.
3. Deloitte Consulting LLP, Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business, 2012, Chapter 3.
4. Don Norman, “The paradox of wearable technologies,” MIT Technology
Review, July 24, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517346/the-
paradox-of-wearable-technologies/, accessed December 19, 2013.
5. News.com.au, “Tiny pill joins the battle of the bushfires,” http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/
tiny-pill-joins-the-battle-of-the-bushfires/story-fneuz9ev-1226555482375, accessed December 19, 2013.
6. Jonah Comstock, “Keas raises $8M, partners with Fitbit for gamified employee wellness,”
MobiHealthNews, June 25, 2013, http://mobihealthnews.com/20186/keas-raises-8m-
partners-with-fitbit-for-gamified-employee-wellness/, accessed December 19, 2013.
7. Michael Millar, “How wearable technology could transform business,” BBC News Business, August
5, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23579404, accessed December 19, 2013.
8. Angela McIntyre and Jessica Ekholm, Market trends: Enter the wearable electronics
market with products for the quantified self, Gartner, Inc., July 1, 2013.
9. Stacey Higginbotham, “You call Google Glass wearable tech? Heapsylon makes sensor-rich
fabric,” Gigaom, May 16, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/05/16/you-call-google-glass-
wearable-tech-heapsylon-makes-sensor-rich-fabric/, accessed December 19, 2013.
Wearables
63

10. Mike Orcutt, “Electronic sensors printed directly on the skin,” MIT Technology
Review, March 11, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512061/electronic-
sensors-printed-directly-on-the-skin/, accessed December 19, 2013.
11. World Health Organization, Medicines: rational use of medicines, http://www.
who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs338/en/, accessed January 8, 2014.
12. Proteus, “Digital health feedback system,” http://www.proteus.com/technology/
digital-health-feedback-system, accessed January 20, 2014.
13. Fiona Graham, “The pill that texts your doctor—from inside your body,” BBC News,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23620996, accessed January 8, 2014.
14. Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), Consumer interest in purchasing wearable
fitness devices in 2014 quadruples, according to CEA study, press release, http://
www.ce.org/News/News-Releases/Press-Releases/2013-Press-Releases/Consumer-
Interest-in-Purchasing-Wearable-Fitness-D.aspx, accessed January 20, 2014.
15. Antonio Bertone and Stephane Marceau, “Why the wearable explosion is driving tech
and fashion convergence,” Gigaom, http://gigaom.com/2013/12/14/why-the-wearable-
explosion-is-driving-tech-and-fashion-convergence/, accessed January 8, 2014.
16. Heapsylon, “Sensoria for healthcare,” http://www.heapsylon.com/
sensoria-healthcare/, accessed January 8, 2014.
17. Sam Grobart, “MC10’s biostamp: The new frontier in medical diagnostics,”
Businessweek, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-13/mc10s-biostamp-
the-new-frontier-of-medical-diagnostics, accessed January 8, 2014.
18. Susanna Kim, “Huggies tweetpee app tweets parents about when it’s time to change
baby’s diaper,” http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/05/huggies-tweetpee-app-
tweets-parents-when-its-time-to-change-diapers/, accessed January 8, 2014.
19. Philips, Philips collaborates with Accenture to create first proof of concept for delivering vital
patient data via Google Glass, http://www.newscenter.philips.com/main/standard/news/
press/2013/20131003-Philips-collaborates-with-Accenture-to-create-first-proof-of-concept-for-
delivering-vital-patient-data-via-Google-Glass.wpd#.Up5BwcRDuIQ, accessed January 8, 2014.
20. Maria Doyle, “How Google Glass is now being used during surgery,” Forbes,
accessed January 8, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ptc/2013/11/05/how-google-
glass-is-now-being-used-during-surgery/, accessed January 8, 2014.
21. Shimmer, “Overview,” http://www.shimmersensing.com/solutions/
overview/#overview-tab, accessed January 8, 2014.
22. Wexner Medical Center, Ohio State University, “Google Glass,” http://medicalcenter.osu.
edu/mediaroom/features/Pages/Google-Glass.aspx, accessed January 8, 2014.
23. Thomas Pratt (president of CraneMorley), discussion with the author, January 7, 2014.
64

Technical debt is not a new term,
but it’s gaining renewed interest.
Originally coined by Ward Cunningham
in 1992, the phrase describes the “not quite
right” code typically introduced with initial
software releases because of an incomplete
understanding of how the system should
work.1
Organizations that regularly repay
technical debt by consolidating and revising
software as their understanding grows
will likely be better positioned to support
investments in innovation. And like financial
debt, organizations that don’t “pay it back” can
be left allocating the bulk of their budgets to
interest (i.e., system maintenance), with little
remaining to develop software that can support
new opportunities.
Technical debt is often the result of
programmers taking shortcuts or using
unsophisticated techniques. It’s typically
misfeasance, not malfeasance. For example,
a developer may copy and paste code blocks
without thinking through the longer-term
consequences. If the code ever needs to be
updated, someone will have to remember to fix
it in each instance.
But sometimes, technical debt is simply the
result of dealing with complex requirements.
To meet a project deadline, complicated
proprietary code may be developed, even
though simpler alternatives may have been
available. With each such action, technical debt
proliferates. This is like high-interest, short-
term borrowing. If you don’t pay off the debt
promptly, compounding kicks in.
The impact of accumulated technical debt
can be decreased efficiency, increased cost,
and extended delays in the maintenance of
existing systems. This can directly jeopardize
operations, undermining the stability and
reliability of the business over time. It also can
stymie the ability to innovate and grow.
Articulating technical debt is the first step
in paying off its balance. With new tools for
scanning and assessing software assets, CIOs
can now gauge the quality of their legacy
footprint—and determine what it would cost
to eliminate the inevitable debt. A recent
study suggests that an average of $3.61 of
technical debt exists per line of code, or an
average of more than $1 million per system.2
Gartner says that “current global IT debt is
estimated to stand at $500 billion, with the
Technical debt reversal
Lowering the IT debt ceiling
Technical debt is a way to understand the cost of code quality and the impacts
of architectural issues. For IT to help drive business innovation, managing
technical debt is a necessity. Legacy systems can constrain growth because
they may not scale; because they may not be extensible into new scenarios
like mobile or analytics; or because underlying performance and reliability
issues may put the business at risk. But it’s not just legacy systems: New
systems can incur technical debt even before they launch. Organizations
should purposely reverse their debt to better support innovation and growth—
and revamp their IT delivery models to minimize new debt creation.
67

potential to rise to $1 trillion by 2015.”3
While
the idea of debt doubling in a year’s time
may seem astonishing, we’re in the midst
of unprecedented investments in disruptive
technologies—often with deep hooks into
core systems. The push for rapid innovation
in unproven domains is also leading to
compounding debt.
These estimates address only the literal
definition of technical debt—how much it
would cost to fix the exposed code quality
issues. But there’s also another dimension,
which we call “architectural debt.”
Architectural debt refers to the opportunity
costs associated with system outages or the
inability to deliver new capabilities. In some
cases, architecturally complex defects can
absorb as much as 52 percent of the total effort
spent repairing defects.4
They can also derail
new initiatives.
Technical debt is not limited to legacy
systems; every new project has the potential
to add to the backlog. With that in mind,
you should incorporate the cost of technical
debt into project management processes and
portfolio reporting. This kind of transparency
can not only raise awareness of quality among
development teams, but can also provide a
foundation for talking to the business about
the hidden cost of IT delivery. By documenting
your debt-decreasing efforts, you can account
for those efforts—important progress that
Technical debt per line of code within
a typical application.1
$3.61
The defect removal efﬁciency of most
forms of testing.2
Estimated global annual expenditure on
software debugging in 2012.3
Portion of total effort spent repairing
architecturally complex defects, though
they account for only 8% of all defects.4
Sources: 1
Alexandra Szynkarski, "Time to start estimating technical debt,"
October 29, 2012, http://www.ontechnicaldebt.com/blog/time-to-start-
estimating-technical-debt, accessed December 27, 2013. 2
Namcook
Analytics LLC, "Software defect origins and removal methods," July 21, 2013,
http://namcookanalytics.com/software-defect-origins-and-removal-methods,
accessed January 6, 2014. 3
University of Cambridge, "Financial content:
Cambridge University study states software bugs cost economy $312 billion
per year," https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/media/2013/ﬁnancial-content-
cambridge-university-study-states-software-bugs-cost-economy-312-
billion-per-year/#.UryqUGRDsS4%20, accessed December 27, 2013.
4
B. Curtis, "Architecturally complex defects," December 19, 2012,
http://it-cisq.org/architecturally-complex-defects, accessed December 27, 2013.
35PERCENT
$312BILLION
52PERCENT
68

would likely not otherwise be visible (or
appreciated).5
The ability to quantify technical debt can
provide a common point of reference for
the C-suite when you are deciding how to
prioritize IT projects for an organization.
Typically, technical debt should be paid
down within the context of delivering against
business priorities by incrementally refactoring
existing solutions and using improved
development processes to minimize new
debt accumulation. Incorporating techniques
described in our Real-time DevOps chapter6
can help reduce waste generated when software
is developed.
Some organizations may also need to spur
projects that address especially messy issues
such as bolstering performance, preventing
production issues, or preparing for future
strategic investments. The goal is a sustained,
prioritized reduction of the balance sheet,
where each project systematically improves on
the baseline.
For most organizations, technical debt
comes with the territory, an unavoidable
outcome of decades of technology spend.
The big question is: How will you manage
the liability? Understanding, containing, and
mitigating technical debt can be a platform,
not only for a stronger IT foundation, but for
a renewed level of trust and transparency with
the business.
69

Express delivery of quality
To keep up with the over 150 billion pieces
of mail delivered each year,7
the United States
Postal Service (USPS) depends in large part on
the quality and effectiveness of its IT systems.
So when quality concerns became apparent
during one of its IT modernization projects
and the USPS was facing budget concerns,
USPS leadership proactively took action to
manage the organization’s technical debt.
First, USPS used the SQALE8
method
for assessing the quality of its technical debt
across four software dimensions: reliability,
performance, security, and changeability. With
a clearer picture of how much technical debt
existed and where, USPS developed a roadmap
to remediate the critical software issues and
transition to long-term sustainment following
CISQ9
standards. For example, USPS instituted
automated unit test scripts, minimum code
coverage testing levels, and static analysis of
the source code. These changes improved
application quality and performance.
Going forward, USPS is also applying these
same measurable standards to other projects
by including them as standard oversight and
acceptance criteria in their statements of work.
And because incorrect project estimates can
introduce technical debt, USPS is revamping
its project estimation techniques by requiring
the use of both parametric and bottom-up
estimating techniques. With these changes,
USPS is starting to see both improved quality
and more accurately planned IT costs across
its portfolio.
Cleaning up shop
DB Systel, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn,
is one of Germany’s leading information
technology and communications providers,
running approximately 500 high-availability
business systems for its customers. In order
to keep this complex environment—a mix of
packaged and in-house–developed systems
that range from mainframe to mobile—
running efficiently while continuing to
address the needs of its customers, DB Systel
decided to embed processes and tools within
its development and maintenance activities to
actively address its technical debt.
DB Systel’s software developers have
employed new tools during development
so they can detect and correct errors more
efficiently. Using a software analysis and
measurement platform from CAST, DB Systel
has been able to uncover architectural hot
spots and transactions in its core systems that
carry significant structural risk. DB Systel is
now better able to track the nonfunctional
quality characteristics of its systems and
precisely measure changes in architecture-
and code-level technical debt within these
applications to prioritize the areas with
highest impact.
By implementing this strategy at the
architecture level, DB Systel has seen a
reduction in time spent on error detection
and an increased focus on leading-practice
development techniques. The company
also noticed a rise in employees’ intrinsic
motivation as a result of using CAST.10
With an
effective technical debt management process
in place, DB Systel is mitigating the possibility
of software deterioration while also enriching
application quality.
70

Countdown to zero technical debt
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory project was classified as a “flagship mission”—the agency’s
first in almost a decade. It was a $2.5 billion project to land a car-sized, roving science laboratory,
Curiosity, on Mars. The rover launched in 2011 and landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, with the
continuing objective of determining whether Mars ever contained the building blocks for life.
Building a roving science lab is an immense challenge. Curiosity is an order of magnitude larger
than any rover that had previously landed on Mars: It weighs almost a ton, stands seven feet tall,
contains a robotic arm that could easily pick up a person, and includes a laser that vaporizes rocks.
Curiosity’s software is essentially the brain of the rover—integrating its many hardware functions
to provide mission-critical functionality such as the descent and landing sequence, autonomous
driving, avionics, telecommunications, and surface sample handling.
The software initially developed for Curiosity was inherited from previous rover missions. The
core architecture was developed in the 1990s on a shoestring budget. The Curiosity project put
approximately four years of work into building on top of that architecture for NASA’s most complex
mission to date. As the launch date approached, NASA started to see that the project wasn’t coming
together: The software had bugs and inexplicably failed tests; there were issues with the hardware
and the fabrication of key components.
The project faced a difficult question: Do we push on towards a 2009 launch or delay the
mission? The unique aspect of launching a mission to Mars is that the opportunity only exists once
every 26 months, when Earth and Mars align. If they delayed the launch two years, there was a risk
that the project might be cancelled altogether.
The project team decided to postpone the mission and began an incredible regrouping effort.
The software team had to quickly decide whether to fix the current software or to start over
completely from scratch. Given the existing software’s technical debt, it was unlikely they could
determine the magnitude of the lurking issues, or confidently plan for new project milestones. The
decision was made to tear down the foundation and rebuild using the old code as a reference.
The team started from the beginning: revisiting the requirements, software design, coding, and
reviews, and testing and implementing standard processes. The team instituted what they called the
“Power Ten,” a set of 10 basic rules each developer followed. The team developed coding standards,
implemented multiple automated code analyzers and testing tools, and established a cadence of
releases—one every four months. They unit tested every line of code and instituted code reviews
early in the development lifecycle. Two hundred code reviews produced 10,000 peer comments and
25,000 tool comments—each one reviewed and resolved.
The results were staggering: 3.5 million lines of code, over 1 million hand-written, across 150
different modules. But this time, the numerous bugs and unexplained failures were gone. The
standards, though they required additional work, added stability and quality. And with the fresh
start, the team were adamant that technical debt be minimized—building a new foundation for
future missions.
Though NASA’s approach required a remarkably difficult decision, the results were worth the
effort. The world can now watch as Curiosity tells us more than we ever dreamed we might know
about Mars. And the achievements of the mission led to the announcement of a new $1.5 billion
mission to Mars in 2020.
71

Combating system complexity
Military Health System (MHS), a unit
within the United States Department of
Defense, provides billions of dollars’ worth of
health services to over 9 million beneficiaries.11
Facing enterprise-wide budget cuts, MHS
began looking for ways to provide the same
level of care with reduced resources. With
dozens of IT systems built over 20 years ago,
including clinical systems, supply chain, and
billing, MHS recognized that reducing its
technical debt was one way the organization
could reduce its IT budget and improve
business efficiency.
MHS embarked on a transformation with
portfolio rationalization at the forefront in
an effort to streamline its investments. Using
an application health grid that removed
potential subjectivity, MHS measured the
business value, technical maturity, and cost
of each of its systems. Business value was
determined by how many business processes
are supported. The technical maturity analysis
focused on four areas: external stability (an
evaluation of third-party software, hardware,
and associated vendors); internal stability (an
architectural evaluation); system availability;
and security. The rationalization effort helped
MHS identify over a dozen systems with
high levels of technical debt that could be
decommissioned—saving the organization
over $50 million in ongoing operating costs
within the first phase of the transformation.
MHS continues to use data-driven
analytics implemented through SEMOSS.12
The transformation that began with
portfolio rationalization has now moved into
optimization and dynamic portfolio planning.
Reviewing a system’s technical composition in
combination with functional capabilities allows
MHS to protect itself against future technical
debt and make informed decisions about its
overall IT portfolio.
72

Technical debt doesn’t just happen because
of poor code quality or shoddy design. Often,
it’s the result of a series of good or necessary
decisions made over time—actions individually
justified by their immediate ROI or the needs of
a project. There are many examples: skipping
a software update or infrastructure upgrade
because there wasn’t a clear business benefit;
building point-to-point interfaces into a small
departmental app to get it into the business’s
hands more quickly; choosing a product you
already own to build a prototype in order
to avoid a drawn-out vendor selection and
procurement process.
The path to technical debt can be paved with
good intentions, but when combined, can lead
you to quality and architectural issues.
But good intentions don’t give you a pass to
ignore technical debt. Leading IT organizations
can, and should, actively manage and reverse
technical debt. These organizations have a
vision for robust platforms ready to fuel growth
and use nimble business-aligned delivery
models to innovate, fulfill unexpected business-
driven requirements, and ultimately solve
business problems.
There are two aspects that are important to
technical debt management. The first is to
know where you stand. Reversal starts with
visibility—a baseline of lurking quality and
architectural issues. Develop simple, compelling
ways that describe the potential impact of the
issues in order to foster understanding by those
who determine IT spending. Make technical
debt a metric that your IT organization is
conscious of—not just in planning and portfolio
management, but in how projects get delivered.
The second is with the actual management of
technical debt. There are a couple of ways to
approach it: a big bang approach that fixes
everything at once (which almost never works)
or a selective approach to systematically reduce
the backlog. Consider what is needed in the
next year or two to assist with achieving your
strategic goals. This will allow you to identify the
parts of your portfolio that should be upgraded
to achieve those goals. When it comes to each
of your platforms, don’t be afraid to jettison
certain parts.
At Deloitte, we deliberately separate our
IT budget into core and business-driven
investments so business users can choose
investments driven by their priorities. A
server upgrade rarely trumps a functional
requirement when battling for fixed
investment funds. That’s why
architecture, platform, and
technical debt investments are
part of our core investment
bucket—with priorities set
by the IT organization. My
philosophy is: What’s the point
of having a CIO if I need a
committee to approve every
upgrade? By keeping the core
investments separate from the
business-driven investments,
we are able to avoid the
technical debt we might
otherwise accrue.
Preventing technical debt requires
a philosophy that addresses the
known and expected requirements with
an underlying, agile platform. CIOs need
the courage to make the investments that
reduce technical debt—and the knowledge and
the team to know where and when to make
those investments.
My take
Larry Quinlan, global chief information officer,
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited
73

Technical debt calculation can begin when
you have clear visibility to the quality of code
for legacy systems as well as projects on the
horizon. Only with both sets of information
can you make the trade-offs necessary
to manage technical debt effectively. For
companies eager to get ahead of the technical
debt curve, here are some important steps:
• Assess the status of code for all significant
investments. Calculate your technical
debt. Know the size of the hole you’re
in—and whether or not it’s getting deeper.
Evaluate the importance of each system to
understand whether the technical debt has
to be addressed—and in what timeframe.
Aim for surgical repairs when possible, but
recognize that some aging systems may be
beyond incremental fixes. Prevention is
preferred, but early detection at least allows
for a thoughtful response.
• Find out how future investments are
dependent on your legacy systems. Is your
architecture ready for new initiatives? Can
it scale appropriately? How well are back-
end complications understood and fed into
planning efforts? Should you launch legacy
modernization efforts now to get ahead of
impending business demands?
• Think through the availability of talent
to support debt remediation. For some
aging systems, your resources may not be
sufficient for cost-effective updating. Talent
should be factored into your analysis.
Think of it as a multiplier on top of the raw
technical debt calculation—and use it to
define priorities and timelines.
• Hold developers accountable. Consider
rating and rewarding developers on the
quality of their code. In some cases, fewer
skilled developers may be better than
volumes of mediocre resources whose
work may require downstream reversal
of debt. Regularly run code complexity
reviews and technical debt assessments,
sharing the results across the team. Not
only can specific examples help the team
improve, but trends can signal that a
project is headed in the wrong direction or
encountering unexpected complexity.
• Spread the wealth (and the burden).
Communities are great ways to identify
and address technical debt. Peer code
reviews are leading practices for informal
spot checks. Formal quality assessments
by seasoned architects can find issues
that would be undetectable with standard
QA processes. Learn from open source
communities, where quality is continuously
refined by the extended pool of developers
poring over each other’s code.13
• Determine your debt repayment
philosophy. Companies have different
profiles when it comes to debt for the
various parts of their asset pools. Debt
is not inherently bad; it can fuel new
investments and accelerate product
launches. But left unchecked, it can be
crippling. There’s no single right answer for
the appropriate amount of technical debt,
but its accumulation should be a conscious,
transparent decision.
Where do you start?
74

Bottom line
When CIOs operate like venture capitalists,14
technical debt is a big part of the financial picture.
Without a clear view of the real cost of legacy systems, CIOs lack the information required to make
effective decisions about new initiatives and investments. While it’s important not to get obsessed with
technical debt, it’s also critical to understand and plan for it. Every new project automatically comes
with technical debt as a cost of doing business. Reversing technical debt is a long-term investment,
but if left unaddressed, it can bankrupt your ability to build for the future. Capers Jones, a long-term
technical debt specialist, once said: “If you skimp on quality before you deliver software, you end up
paying heavy interest downstream after the software is released for things you could have gotten rid of
earlier, had you been more careful.”15
He was right.
Authors
Scott Buchholz, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Scott Buchholz is a technology leader with 20 years of experience
in the areas of solution, enterprise, and data architecture;
program management; and IT service management. He
leads technology-enabled business transformations, from
optimization efforts to full lifecycle implementations.
David Sisk, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Davis Sisk is a director in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s US
Technology practice. He has extensive experience in the
architecture, design, development, and deployment of enterprise
applications, focusing on the custom development area.
75

Endnotes
1. Ward Cunningham, “The WyCash Portfolio Management System,” http://
c2.com/doc/oopsla92.html, accessed December 31, 2013.
2. CAST, “Technical debt estimation,” http://www.castsoftware.com/research-
labs/technical-debt-estimation, accessed January 9, 2014.
3. Andy Kyte, “Measure and manage your IT debt,” Gartner, Inc.,
August 9, 2010 (last reviewed June 19, 2013).
4. B. Curtis, “Architecturally complex defects,” December 19, 2012, http://it-cisq.
org/architecturally-complex-defects/, accessed January 9, 2014
5. David K. Williams, “The hidden debt that could be draining your company,” Forbes,
January 25, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkwilliams/2013/01/25/the-hidden-
debt-that-could-be-draining-your-company/, accessed December 21, 2013.
7. United States Postal Service (USPS), Progress and performance: Annual report to Congress
2012, http://about.usps.com/publications/annual-report-comprehensive-statement-2012/
annual-report-comprehensive-statement-2012.pdf, accessed January 9, 2014.
8. Software Quality Assessment based on Lifecycle Expectations (SQALE) is a generic,
language- and tool-independent method for assessing the quality of source code.
9. The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) is an IT industry leadership
group dedicated to improving IT application quality.
10. “German national railroad operator ensures quality management with
CAST,” IT Expert Magazine, May/June 2013, pp. 38-39.
11. Military Health System (MHS), 2012 MHS stakeholders’ report, http://
www.health.mil/Libraries/Documents_Word_PDF_PPT_etc/2012_MHS_
Stakeholders_Report-120207.pdf, accessed January 9, 2014.
12. SEMOSS, “Context aware analytics,” http://semoss.org/, accessed January 9, 2014.
13. Simon Phipps, “Oracle’s closed approach keeps Java at risk,” Infoworld, April
26, 2013, http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/oracles-closed-
approach-keeps-java-risk-217297, accessed December 21, 2013.
15. Joe McKendrick, “Will software publishers ever shake off their ‘technical debt’?,”
ZDNet, January 26, 2013, http://www.zdnet.com/will-software-publishers-ever-
shake-off-their-technical-debt-7000010366/, accessed December 21, 2013.
76

Organizations have spent the last
several years chasing the tantalizing
prospect of “social.” Within the enterprise,
social represents a bastion of hope for
productivity and collaboration—a chance to
effectively navigate who knows what, who
knows whom, how work gets done, and how
decisions get made. We’re still in the opening
frames of a broad wave of social-driven
enterprise transformation,1
as a recent study by
MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte
confirms. That study revealed that 69 percent
of executives thought social business would
be critical to their organizations in the next
three years.2
Social businesses3
ideally rally around
well-defined business problems, supported
by committed communities with well-
defined incentives for participation. To take
full advantage of this potential, age-old
organizational constraints need to be identified
and rewired. Hierarchies, biases, standardized
operating procedures, rigid job descriptions,
and other embodiments of institutional inertia
can stunt progress.
Meanwhile, the flurry of activity around
external social channels continues. Social
media has become a frequent online
destination, commanding 27 percent of global
time spent on the web.4
Not surprisingly,
social monitoring and listening were some
of the earlier investments companies made
in the social arena. Social efforts leaned on
the enabling tools that allowed passive data
collection, tracking the volume of surface-
level activity and broad-stroke awareness—
followers, likes, mentions, and click-throughs
to their own corporate channels. As the
numbers grew, premature victory was
announced. But volume doesn’t tell you
much—good, bad, or indifferent.
Monitoring gave way to sentiment analysis.
Raw quantitative counts were replaced by
happy and sad faces in an attempt to glean
what the social masses were thinking about
brands, products, services, and campaigns.
Once again, out-of-the-box tools were often
used to drive sentiment calculations, but they
often lacked the nuance and context needed
in business. The aggregated sentiment was
a general measure of positivity, but it lacked
subject-matter specificity. The sentiment camps
ignored so-called “neutral” conversation—the
lion’s share of dialogue and the place where
opinions are formed through exploration and
discussion. Sentiment analysis was difficult
Social activation
From passive to active tense
Over the years, the focus of social business has shifted from measuring
volume to monitoring sentiment and, now, toward changing perceptions.
In today’s recommendation economy, companies should focus on
measuring the perception of their brand and then on changing how
people feel, share, and evangelize. Companies can activate their audiences
to drive their message outward—handing them an idea and getting
them to advocate it in their own words to their own network.
Social activation
79

to take action on, though the possibility
nonetheless sparked a wave of investments in
social command centers.
The thought process was that we need
to do something, now that we’ve shone the
light on what people are saying about us. So
companies rolled out social-based customer
service, communications, broadcast marketing,
and crisis communications. These applications
use social as another channel and are largely a
means to distribute mass messaging or to pull
customers back to a company’s own websites
and call centers.
The business potential of social
technologies is real. But that potential lies
in moving from monitoring sentiment
to influencing perception—and helping
customers become advocates for marketing, for
sales enablement, and for servicing.
The recommendation economy
Social activation is based on the new
recommendation economy—where customers
have tuned out anything that smells like
traditional advertising, seeking instead the
contextualized recommendations of peers.
We have seen the rise of informed, passionate
audiences who are ready to engage—willing
co-creators who are actively sharing what they
are interested in, buying, and using. They are
participating in their own words, on their own
turf, with personalized messages on social
networks, blogs, community forums, and other
locations where those with shared interests
1 Focus: Map the audience
3 Perception: Use brand analysis to
identify target areas
4 Audience: Distribute content through
advocates, enable audience contribution
5 Campaigns: Inject new energy
2 Insight: Identify inﬂuencers
Social
Blogs
brand discussion
market size
Forums
overall conversation
top authors
influencers
Positive
Neutral
sentiment
Negative
attribute
“Stylish”
Brand A
attribute
“Durable”
Brand B
activity
Fan interaction
Outreach
Regular
content
Promotions and
special features
activity
Followers
Brand AMay June July
% change
J F M A M J J A S O N D
80

congregate. They are inspired to share why
they made a decision, what they considered
along the way, and why others should follow
suit. A recent Nielsen study confirmed that 84
percent of global respondents trust word-of-
mouth recommendations from friends and
family—the most highly rated among digital
and traditional methods.5
Social activation involves new tactics.
Audiences and influencers need to be
understood at a granular level—who they are,
what they care about, and how they spend
their time. Then campaigns can be designed
to empower and engage specific communities
for tangible, expected results. Content should
be rapidly created, tailored, monitored, and
refined—according to the context of the
audience, the outcome, and the campaign.
It should be designed so that consumers feel
motivated to add context to brand content
with their individual insights for friends and
readers. Content supply chains are often put
in place, allowing core collateral to be pushed
through internal and external ranks—in
formats that encourage regional social teams
and end consumers to localize, personalize,
and enhance it.
Finally, digital outreach can—and should—
be paired with traditional in-store or on-site
campaigns, delivering on the potential of
seamless, omni-channel digital engagement.6
The goal is not to divert social activity onto
corporate assets; instead, it is to influence
outcomes and promote advocacy.
Social activation
81

The social TV experience
Recognizing that the Internet and social
media have started changing the way people
watch TV, the FOX Broadcasting Company
identified an opportunity to both enrich the
TV viewing experience of its existing fans and
generate a new fan base through an engaging
second screen experience using social media
and the voices of its dedicated viewers.
FOX’s approach combines the live television
viewing experience with a parallel online
experience specifically designed for each show
and the preferences of its audience. For one
reality show, FOX let fans vote for the winner
via Twitter. Another show uses social media for
a “fan of the week” contest where individuals
publicly share why they are a fan and winners
are given “shout-outs” on-air during the
broadcast.7
When FOX News started letting
viewers agree or disagree in real time with
speakers on one show, they saw its audience
grow by 21 percent among a key demographic.8
By designing separate social business
strategies for each show and enabling viewers
with compelling content, FOX has activated a
large, online fan community that is driving the
conversation and helping amplify its message
to reach new viewers.
Unleashing the power of social
Four years ago, Hartz, one of the nation’s
largest providers of pet products, was not
engaged in social media. Recognizing the need
to have a social presence to remain competitive
in the marketplace, Hartz launched a
multifaceted social media strategy designed
to educate and foster relationships with
pet enthusiasts.
The company listened to the online
conversations of pet owners and developed
content in response—having detailed
conversations with owners and breaking down
the company’s products for specific audiences
such as small dog or short-haired cat owners.
It conducted online contests and engaged
industry influencers, largely bloggers, with
relevant pet care topics and products to test.
Hartz also used social media to educate pet
owners on which pest control products were
best suited for their companions through the
interactive “Flea and Tick Education Center”
on its Facebook page.
Hartz was able to tap into the widespread
positive conversations about animals that were
already happening in social media, positioning
itself as an advocate for an existing online
community passionate about pets and their
overall well-being. As a result, Hartz has built
an affinity between its brand and the “pet
lifestyle,” creating stronger relationships with
its customers.
82

Community outreach
Parallels, a desktop virtualization and hosting and cloud services enablement company, sells
Parallels Desktop for Mac, which allows users to run Windows applications on a Mac® computer,9
side by side, without rebooting. Several years ago, Parallels faced competitive pressure and wanted
to improve its online reputation. The company decided to engage with its customers across
multiple social media channels and share the insights with its engineering and marketing teams to
incorporate the customers’ voice into its product.
The virtualization engine is complex software—running two or more operating systems on the
same piece of hardware and making them act as if they are one. The product team had a roadmap
for performance improvements and sophisticated new features, but the company launched a
listening study to see what other ideas might come from social media followers. The study found
that one out of three recommendations to buy a competitor’s product was based on its “prettiness.”
By polishing the product—rounding the corners on message boxes, creating more natural
translations of error messages originally written in another language, shifting the color palette of
the menus and headers—Parallels had the opportunity to convert new customers. This was new
feedback not previously shared in direct customer input or focus groups—but in the world of open
purchase recommendations, the company was able to directly address the perceived gap in usability.
Social activation helped reshape the company’s product roadmap and drive new revenue.
Parallels also created two separate programs to build its online reputation: an “influencers
program,” in which a group of power users were encouraged to write content for a Parallels
blog highlighting their own uses of the program; and the “advocates program,” which leveraged
customers who were avid social media users and positive supporters of the product and brand to
help increase positive sentiment via social channels. Both programs activated passionate users—
giving them access to beta software and encouraging them to share their perspectives to shape
future product releases.
A few years later, when an updated version of the software was two weeks away from being
released, an employee of a big box retailer accidentally shelved it early, and a customer took a
picture of the packaging exposing the product’s specifications, features, and marketing messaging.
Parallels had planned massive media coverage announcing the product release, but it was scheduled
to be launched two weeks later. The company decided instead to go to market with the product at
the time of the leak solely with social media and public relations communications. Members of
its influencer and advocate programs were core pillars of the roll-out. Due to the strong, engaged
online community that Parallels had built, that online messaging alone drove sales of the new
product equivalent to those of the previous year’s release.
The company’s realization of the importance of cultivating, appealing to, and rewarding a
passionate community of customers transformed its brand. Especially with strong competition,
customer perception can change quickly, and maintaining customer loyalty is fundamental
to maintaining sales. Today, Parallels Desktop has 90 percent market share in Mac desktop
virtualization software.10
Social activation
83

Social is the glue that holds together our IGN
site experience. We’ve been a web property
for over 16 years—before Facebook, YouTube,
and Twitter. Facilitating a social experience
between our users has consistently been at
the core of what we do. We morphed from
exclusively trying to pull visitors to our website
to proactively pushing content to where gamers
live through social channels like Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. The crux
of that strategy is our premium content
delivered by recognizable online
personalities, intended to resemble
the person on the couch next to
you playing a video game.
Opinion is the basis of our social
interaction. But opinion can be
a two-edged sword. People
sometimes talk about games
two years before their release,
and it’s almost as if they’re
“willing” games to be good.
If highly anticipated games
earn negative reviews, that
generates heated conversation;
for our users, it can sometimes
be about satisfying expectations
or justifying purchase decisions
rather than about the game itself. The
editorial team has to actively participate
in discussions to make sure the audience
doesn’t place blame on the messenger. The
openness of voice we strive for can also be
challenging for our relationship with the industry.
But, we believe authenticity is at the core of
engagement—especially via social channels.
Game developer Peter Molyneux signed on
our wall, “Thank you for all the reviews, both
the good ones and the bad ones.” The bad
reviews give him an added push to improve his
upcoming products.
IGN went public right before the dot-com
crash and started looking for alternate revenue
streams. At that time, we had a vibrant
community on our message boards, accounting
for approximately 50 percent of our page
views. Experimenting with how to monetize
our users, we moved a large portion of that
community behind a paywall. Though the
short-term gain was beneficial, this ultimately
stunted our growth and created a love-hate
relationship with the most vocal segment of
our user base. Shortly thereafter, we moved the
paywall back and reintroduced free forums. Two
years ago, we created the subscription service,
Prime, which lets subscribers behind the “velvet
rope”—an ad-free experience, free games, and
access to our editorial team—without keeping
other users out. The moment we pivoted, we
saw the site’s growth return.
I recommend four steps for getting started with
social channels. First, understand your baseline
audience. We run an annual segmentation study
to determine our audience. Second, identify,
and activate, your social influencers. We labeled
this segment our “All Stars.” We have someone
dedicated to interface with them because, while
they are influential enough to run their own
blogs and cultivate their own Twitter followers,
we also want them to keep using our tools
and share our content. To this end, we provide
rewards in the form of social currency, such
as highlighting their commentary on IGN’s
homepage. Third, execute on your plan. For
example, facilitate giveaways and contests that
encourage your audience to share comments
and content. Lastly, appropriately measure your
outreach—different content is appropriate for
different social channels. Some channels are
better suited for traffic referrals and others for
starting conversations and getting the word
out. Don’t get caught up in “vanity metrics” like
how many followers you have. Focus on what
matters: true engagement, quality content
sharing, and commentary.
My take
Peer Schneider, executive vice president and co-founder,
IGN Entertainment
84

There are many beneficial social listening,
sentiment, and analytics products on the
market—and likely many already within your
organization. But social activation shouldn’t
start with tools. Instead, it should begin
with well-defined business objectives and
measurable, attributable metrics that can guide
your efforts. Your objective may be to increase
the number of leads or sales, boost your share
of voice on a strategic topic, or reduce call
volume to your call center.
Once the call to action is clear, the
following areas of emphasis can help you fast-
forward to social activation:
• Focus. Avoid the temptation to overload
initial efforts across too many desired
outcomes. There will be opportunities
to extend the reach and effect of
campaigns, but initially you should opt for
focused results.
• Insight. Gain understanding about existing
communities, channels, and content.
Community insight involves understanding
the various relevant constituencies
within regions and groups, as well as the
influencers and their relationships across
the market. Channel intelligence measures
the impact that programs make across
various digital platforms and sites. Content
reviews look to understand the health of
social assets and how aligned they are to
community and channel preferences.
• Perception. Perception involves uncovering
what conversations are taking place, where
they’re happening, and how people really
think and feel about the company or
product. Counting Facebook “likes” or how
many tweets contained positive words such
as “good” or “happy” only skim the surface.
Instead, engage in a perception study and
let today’s conversations inform how you,
your competitors, and your partners are
perceived. You will likely need to deal with
negative perceptions, amplify positives,
and design strategies to seed and grow your
aspirational perceptions.
• Audience. Gather, monitor, and enlist
targeted pockets within the community
over time. Create plans to motivate and
shape perceptions—including the build-out
of content supply chains to manage, govern,
and enhance digital content worldwide.
Launch hyper-targeted ambassador or
consumer VIP programs, fostering a
community of passionate and connected
users to help drive messaging, promotions,
and—perhaps—even product innovation.
• Campaigns. Focus on the ideation,
creation, execution, and monitoring of
social experiences that engage audiences
and shape perceptions. These may be
tied to external events such as seasons
and holidays, conference schedules, or
industry milestones. Or they may be linked
to internal happenings such as product
launches, new content releases, or media
events. Content, promotions, games, mobile
applications, and microsites that harness
the power of social media to achieve
business objectives are possible tools.
Either way, look to create natural links to
e-commerce platforms—allowing activation
to actually influence sales.
Where do you start?
Social activation
85

Bottom line
Effective social engagement is no longer about consumer loyalty to the brand; it’s about a
company’s ability to nurture loyalty from the consumer.11
The goal is not just passive monitoring, but
active influencing. In today’s recommendation economy, educating and empowering your audience
can lead to impactful, long-lasting results. Social is neither a passive distraction nor a dangling
modifier. It can drive real business performance through measurable, sustainable results. But it
requires a shift in mindset—with a focus on perception, engagement, and activation.
Authors
Dave Hanley, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Dave Hanley is one of the leaders of Deloitte Digital’s social
offering. In his career as a web marketer, he has specialized in
creating and marketing viral social applications. Hanley joined
Deloitte Digital in October 2013 with the acquisition of Banyan
Branch, a leading social media agency which he co-founded.
Alicia Hatch, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Alicia Hatch is one of the leaders of Deloitte Digital’s social offering.
She joined Deloitte Digital in October 2013 with the acquisition
of Banyan Branch, a leading social media agency where she led
new business for the firm, introduced new strategic offerings,
and built a broad client portfolio of Fortune 500 brands.
86

Endnotes
2. MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with Deloitte University Press, Social business: Shifting
out of first gear, http://dupress.com/articles/social-business-study/, accessed December 31, 2013.
3. Deloitte Consulting LLP, Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business, 2012, chapter 1.
4. Experian, Experian Marketing Services reveals 27 percent of time spent online is on social networking,
http://press.experian.com/United-States/Press-Release/experian-marketing-services-reveals-27-
percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking.aspx, accessed December 31, 2013.
5. Nielsen, Global trust in advertising and brand messages, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013/
global-trust-in-advertising-and-brand-messages.html, accessed December 31, 2013.
7. Natan Edelsburg, How Fox is the most social TV network, May 13, 2012, http://lostremote.
com/how-fox-is-the-most-social-tv-network_b29234, accessed January 8, 2014.
8. Brian Steinberg, “Fox News taps new social-media tool to give viewers chance to speak,”
Variety, September 16, 2013, http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/fox-news-taps-new-social-
media-tool-to-give-viewers-chance-to-speak-1200612883/#, accessed December 31, 2013.
authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple, Inc.
10. Scott Buscemi, “Parallels Desktop 9: Noticeably faster, smarter setup and ready
for Mavericks and Windows 8.1 [Review],” September 6, 2013, http://9to5mac.
com/2013/09/06/parallels-desktop-9-noticeably-faster-smarter-setup-and-ready-
for-mavericks-and-windows-8-1-review/, accessed January 27, 2014.
11. Renee DiResta, “Demographics are dead: the new, technical face of marketing,” O’Reilly
Radar, September 3, 2013, http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/demographics-are-dead-
the-new-technical-face-of-marketing.html, accessed December 31, 2013.
Social activation
87

Cloud adoption across the enterprise is a
growing reality. Forrester predicted that
“by the end of 2013, enterprises will use an
average of 9.6 software-as-a-service (SaaS)
applications.”1
Yet much of the cloud usage is
not in lieu of on-premises enterprise systems.
Forrester also found that “only 18 percent of
the enterprises that were first-wave adopters
and less than 9 percent of the second-wave
adopters have used SaaS as a full replacement.”2
As a result, these cloud services increasingly
require integration back to core internal
systems—linking edge offerings to legacy
financials, order management, inventory, HR,
manufacturing, and other enterprise systems.
Companies are connecting clouds—in strings,
clusters, storms, and more—and cobbling
together discrete services to create end-to-end
business processes. Tactical adoption of cloud
is giving way to the need for a coordinated,
orchestrated strategy.
As cloud services continue to expand in
number and sophistication, gaps in managing
cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core portfolios
are beginning to appear, leading to new and
smarter ways to operate in this hyper-hybrid3
IT environment. It is also opening the door for
a new category of offerings: pre-integrated and
orchestrated cloud offerings delivering higher-
order business outcomes-as-a-service.
All together now
Integration, data management, and
enterprise architecture have long been
aspirations for IT. With cloud, these practices
have become more complex. And they’ve
shifted from leading practices to critical
core disciplines. Integration stability and
reliability was the number two challenge in
a recent survey on cloud adoption, trailing
only security concerns.4
Virtually every
enterprise should be developing a strategy on
how to integrate, aggregate, and orchestrate
its collection of cloud and on-premises assets.
Understanding the extensibility, portability,
and reliability of a cloud service should begin
at the sourcing stage.
• Extensibility refers to the ability to get
information into and out of the service—
the availability of data and transactions
to be invoked by other parties and the
ability to trigger external events from
within the cloud service. Many cloud
providers offer lightweight web services
and RESTful5
interfaces, but it’s important
to review the assets around APIs and data
structures—documentation, toolkits,
testing harnesses, backward compatibility,
and deprecation policies.
Cloud orchestration
From cloud to clouds (to core)
Cloud adoption across the enterprise is a growing reality, but much of the usage
is in addition to on-premises systems—not in replacement. As cloud services
continue to expand, companies are increasingly connecting cloud-to-cloud
and cloud-to-core systems—in strings, clusters, storms, and more—cobbling
together discrete services for an end-to-end business process. Tactical adoption
of cloud is giving way to the need for a coordinated, orchestrated strategy—
and for a new class of cloud offerings built around business outcomes.
Cloud orchestration
89

• Portability represents the ease of migrating
your business from the cloud service. Can
data be exported? What about customized
business logic? Are there contractual
terms associated with intellectual
property ownership?
• Reliability addresses performance of
the service—not just the core cloud
offering, but the surrounding stack. For
an orchestrated process, the integration
layer and dependencies on legacy systems
should be able to scale dynamically to take
advantage of the elasticity of cloud services.
The end-to-end business process is only as
strong as its weakest link.
Cloud orchestration can build from a
mature enterprise integration and architecture
footprint. The underlying tenets are familiar:
service orientation, data correlation,
security services (especially authentication,
entitlement management, and encryption),
and a separation of business logic. Several
integration platforms have emerged from
the cloud, offering cloud-based deployment
options as well as preconfigured connectors
and integration patterns for popular cloud
services. Providers include Boomi, CastIron,
MuleSoft, and TIBCO’s Cloud Bus.
New beginnings
The cloud provider market is starting
to address the desire for higher-level, pre-
integrated cloud orchestration services. For
example, consider the example of a health
plan’s recruiting and HR service. Today,
health plans contract with separate cloud
providers for résumé sourcing, background
checks, on-boarding, benefits, payroll, and
performance management—which means
they need to develop and maintain point-to-
point interfaces between the various players to
enable the full prospect-to-employee lifecycle.
They are waiting for an end-to-end “hire to
retire” service to emerge, which could provide
contracting, configuration, and handoffs
across various systems. The enterprise could
subscribe to a single service, priced based on
usage or, in an ideal world, on outcomes.
Traditional ERP players are acquiring and
integrating cloud applications to supplement
core offerings. Established cloud providers are
interest
A tweet in a
new marketing
campaign elicits
a customer
response.
lead
The customer
requests a demo
and receives
an email from
the company.
opportunity
A marketing
rep assigns the
lead to a sales
rep for review.
quote
The sales rep
creates a quote
and converts
the lead to a
new account.
credit
A collections
agent performs
a credit check
and assigns a
credit limit.
contract
With approval
from the sales
manager, the
sales rep creates
a contract.
Tracking a business transaction in the cloud and core
on-premises
90

creating storefronts of complementary cloud
solutions, which make choosing and buying an
expanding inventory of services easier. But we
are still in the early days of this expansion, and
integration often remains the buyer’s problem.
Over time, technical compatibility within a
vendor’s stack should become less challenging.
ERP and cloud providers are also planning
improved interoperability between their
products6
—an encouraging development, to be
sure, but of little help in the immediate term.
Others may yet enter the cloud
orchestration market. Systems integrators and
professional services firms that specialize in
integrating diverse systems could expand and
formalize their roles by pre-integrating the
components of an end-to-end bundle. For
such organizations, this may offer a way to
monetize intellectual property around industry
and process experience while diversifying
from consulting to a product revenue stream.
Several high-tech players looking to expand
their offerings could emerge, such as Amazon,
Google, HP, and Microsoft.
A brave new world
The initial market for effective cloud
orchestration is likely to be startups and
small- to medium-sized businesses. They
could receive the benefits of one-stop access
without the hassle of navigating vendor
contracts, integrating systems, and managing
data. Larger businesses in emerging markets
are also natural targets. Like startups, their
circumstances may not justify a full enterprise
solution. Finally, serial acquirers could gain
agility and advantage from being able to
integrate diverse platforms more efficiently.
In each case, IT’s mission should be to create
integration, data management, and security
services to guide cloud adoption.
But the majority of the Fortune 1000 will
be living with the reality of a mix of cloud
and core offerings, even as sophisticated
cloud orchestration emerges. IT’s charter to
own cloud integration, data, and security is
even more important in this case—especially
as businesses are increasingly dependent on
hybrid operating environments. Build the
components to orchestrate the cloud today,
and you’ll be ready to adopt more compelling
services as the market develops.
order
The sales rep
closes the
opportunity and
initiates order
fulﬁllment.
provisions
The provision
manager creates
license keys for
the customer.
billing
The customer
receives an
invoice and serial
keys from the
collections agent.
payment
The collections
agent follows up
with the customer
about payment.
request
The customer
has a customer
service request.
service
A service rep
responds to the
request and then
resolves the case.
CoreBilling CloudMarketing Cloud Sales Cloud
Cloud orchestration
91

Linking the network7
LinkedIn, a social networking website,
has three main enterprise lines of business:
talent solutions, marketing solutions, and sales
solutions. As Andres Bang, LinkedIn’s head of
global sales and operations systems, described
recently: The company adopted cloud services
to support sales and CRM functions, but found
that its business was outgrowing standard out-
of-the-box capabilities and that its processes
increasingly required integration to ERP and
proprietary systems for generating sales leads.
To address its immediate lead-to-cash
process requirements, and to build a scalable
solution for future orchestration, LinkedIn
adopted a cloud-based integration platform.
Bang explains that by using the integration
platform, LinkedIn was able to connect
multiple systems, including its lead generation
tool, CRM system, financial system, data
warehouse, and proprietary applications.
Integrating both its cloud-based and
on-premises systems created a “single pane
of glass” for the company’s salespeople to
access the information they need to perform
their jobs.
Orchestrated banking8
SunTrust Banks, a leading US financial
services holding company, found that its
relationship managers were encountering
issues with accessing customer information
in a timely manner, threatening their ability
to provide quality customer service. The
root of the issue was the company’s reliance
on an assortment of back-end systems for
loan origination, underwriting, servicing,
and CRM. SunTrust’s architecture was a mix
of cloud services, on-premises packaged
software, and on-premises custom solutions.
The company sought an integrated, scalable
solution to expedite the delivery of services
to customers—and pave the way for future
cloud adoption.
The bank decided to adopt a cloud-
based integration platform to address these
challenges. By connecting SunTrust’s back-end
enterprise application and shared services
to the cloud, SunTrust was able to eliminate
its complex back-end business processes.
Furthermore, the cloud enabled seamless
integration with the bank’s enterprise service
bus and provided preconfigured connectors to
cloud services.
Today, SunTrust maintains a scalable
solution supporting its broader business
process transformation. Furthermore,
relationship managers are empowered with
the tools and resources to access important
customer information in a timely manner,
reducing the time it takes to provide service
to customers.
92

Hybrid high tech
A global hardware and software company was undergoing rapid change stemming from
acquisitions, organic growth, and divestitures. The company’s goal? To maintain its core hardware
and product businesses while expanding its software and services offerings. The company’s
expansion introduced complexity in many areas, such as marketing, sales and incentive
management, product configuration, pricing, and project and workflow management. Speed to
market was a driving force, since the organization wanted to engage with customers from dozens
of countries in a consistent and coordinated manner. The company also recognized that its strategy
was built around continual transformation of its offerings—and that required flexibility and agility
in the enabling systems.
The organization was vexed by decades of what it called “lumpy” expenditures—costly IT
infrastructure refresh cycles, with a history of overspending for capacity because of unpredictable
demand. But the concern was about more than cost and scale. The company also sought shorter
time to market and the ability to more efficiently assimilate new ventures. This was important, given
its recent wave of acquisitions.
The company’s vision is to move to a 100 percent cloud-based infrastructure for the enterprise.
As a first step in fulfilling this vision, and to continue to provide seamless, end-to-end business
processes, the organization orchestrated a complex integration between multiple cloud services
and its on-premises systems. A new sale requires smooth interaction between separate cloud
systems for many processes: calendaring and messaging; materials development; lead and campaign
management; opportunity, sales, and support management; configuration, pricing, and quoting
services; sales and support management; and compensation and incentives. The integration enabled
these systems to communicate with each other, and it also included hooks into on-premises systems
for human resources and order and billing management. Recognizing that the glue to bring together
the various services was as important as the individual functionality being delivered, the company
created disciplines around cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-core integration: tools, architectural
standards, and a dedicated team to drive growth and adoption.
Through the company’s efforts, maintenance costs have gone down: Instead of heavily funding
incremental software improvements, the company is taking advantage of enhancements being rolled
out by the cloud services. System performance has improved; outages have become shorter and less
frequent. The company’s global teams have enjoyed greater browser and device compatibility, as the
cloud offerings have a wider footprint than was historically allowed. And the business feels better
served by IT: IT’s responsiveness has improved, as has the business’s understanding of associated
costs. Finally, the company has started to take the next step toward the overall vision by shifting to
cloud hosting of traditional ERP to “rightsize” the underlying infrastructure—a solution that can
scale up (or down) based on the company’s circumstances.
Cloud orchestration
93

Espresso with a shot of cloud9
Online distribution channels have
transformed Nestlé Nespresso S. A. from a
traditional, coffee-shop-and-boutique-store
business model to a household brand in the
single-serving coffee machine category. But
in order to meet growing global customer
demand, Nespresso needed to replace its
home-grown, complex ERP system with a
more scalable architecture and integrated
cloud solution.
The business began enhancing its enterprise
architecture by launching the Nespresso
Open Architecture (NesOA) platform, a tool
designed from service-oriented architecture
(SOA) principles. With NesOA, Nespresso’s IT
department could support new distribution
channels, manage increased consumer traffic,
and introduce new applications and services to
the business. Furthermore, by using a cloud-
based integration platform, Nespresso could
easily integrate a variety of systems, including
the Nessoft ERP system, an interactive voice
response system, an automated warehouse
management system, and an emergency
ordering tool.
As a result, Nespresso’s NesOA transformed
its home-grown enterprise into a scalable,
automated, and more efficient solution to meet
business needs. Furthermore, it mitigated
the risk of disruption from a single point of
failure with a solution based on clustering
and redundancies. Nespresso is now poised
to leverage cloud and traditional solution
offerings to support future growth of its IT
system landscape.
94

I formerly worked for a regional bank that
generated the majority of its revenue from
mortgage banking. The bank looked to diversify
by focusing on both the retail and commercial
banking lines of business. We recognized that
we could drive immediate revenue in retail by
elevating the customer experience at the point
of sale. The longer-term goal was an integrated
omnichannel experience driven by online and
mobile capabilities, but initially the case for
change was to better serve our customers in
the branch—knowing that the technology we
implemented could provide a solid foundation
for our “connected customer” vision.
Previously, the process for opening an account
with related services was lengthy and inefficient.
Employees accessed multiple systems and
entered duplicative data. In addition, we didn’t
provide bankers with tools or insight to identify
customer needs, and we lacked an automated
way to manage the ongoing customer
relationship. To improve the experience for
both the customer and banker, and with an
eye toward the broader vision, we invested
in a customizable cloud solution with native
customer relationship management (CRM)
capabilities. It provided one delivery system for
branch bankers with increased flexibility, support
for process improvement, and the option for
future expansion across channels.
We chose to go to the cloud for several reasons:
to generate revenue, to increase efficiency, to
be agile enough to respond to changes in the
marketplace, and to differentiate ourselves from
our competitors—while reducing the burden
on the IT organization. Cost factored into, but
didn’t dominate, the investment decision.
Our legacy systems didn’t provide the
functionality needed to solve the business
problem, so we used the cloud and SaaS to
connect multiple core and ancillary systems.
Integration isn’t a new concept, but with the
cloud, a balance has to be struck between
traditional methodologies and the flexibility that
the cloud can introduce. Looking back, there are
a few things we might have done differently,
such as creating more real-time APIs versus
batched transfers. But, overall, the project laid
the groundwork for the longer journey.
During the course of the project, and especially
after go live, the cloud changed how IT and the
business work together. It drove collaboration
and created a new team with an enhanced
skill set and a different mindset. They’re no
longer completing a stand-alone project
and moving on, but dedicated to
driving continuous improvement and
evolving the platform to deliver
business results.
As you take the cloud integration
journey, executive sponsorship
and building enterprise support
are key success factors. Create
a strategic roadmap, and
articulate your plans two
to three years out. Upon
completing the first phase,
showcase the solution and
use the roadmap to sell the
vision to the C-Suite and across
business lines. Provide regular
updates on adoption metrics, user
feedback, progress toward change,
and—more importantly—return on
investment. This keeps the platform
top of mind and makes it easier to gain
support to grow the platform and enhance
its value.
As business leaders, we look for ways to drive
revenue and efficiency, continuously creating
value. At the heart of the banking business is
the relationship we have with our customers,
and building trust is the foundation of that
relationship. What I love about this technology
is that we used it to remove compliance and
operational obstacles and gave bankers the
tools they need to be effective and efficient.
We used technology to enable bankers to be
present, listen, ask questions, and help people—
to make a stronger human connection.
My take
Dounia Lievan, former banking executive
Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Cloud orchestration
95

Even with the more sophisticated cloud
offerings that span end-to-end processes,
the challenge of integrating cloud-to-core
remains. How does the CIO manage the
definition of standards for cloud adoption?
Establish architecture to support integration?
Handle data correlation, retention, and
migration? These are important questions
to answer now—and they’ll be even more
important as cloud services spread across
the enterprise. CIOs should be making
deliberate investments in developing advanced
integration and data management capabilities
to support a cloud-to-cloud-to-core model.
• Petition for a new cloud business model.
Many companies could save money if
cloud pricing was based on usage and
outcomes rather than licensing fees. If this
is true for your organization, let the cloud
providers know. And if your company is
ready for an orchestrated cloud option now,
connect with others who share your need.
Let your voices be heard by the software
vendor community.
• Build an integration foundation. Even
if your organization doesn’t operate in a
cloud-to-core environment, it’s likely you
eventually will. Laying the groundwork now
will make integration easier later. If you’ve
already invested in middleware to link
legacy systems, build from there. However,
you may find that a cloud-based model
requires new approaches.
• Connect the dots. Definitions of customer,
product, employee, and other data elements
vary from one cloud solution to another—
and need to be mapped to your business’s
semantics and taxonomy. Understand
how each application defines its dataset,
and develop a strategy for funneling
data from various cloud systems to
support your organization’s reporting and
analytic objectives.
• Read the fine print. Develop a healthy
skepticism of cloud provider contracts.
Understand your rights to data ownership,
portability, and migration. If you change
providers, can you be confident that your
data is protected? Negotiate terms where
possible to maintain your flexibility.
• Build a strong chain. Overall business
performance is limited by the weakest cloud
solution in the process chain. Understand
the performance variability your business
will tolerate, and weigh whether each
individual cloud service can meet those
demands. And remember: The scalability
and performance of the interconnected
whole is only as strong as its weakest link.
Cloud’s elasticity could stress (and break)
legacy solutions built around more modest,
predictable requirements. Cloud-based
integration platforms ramp up (or down)
to meet your needs—similar to the cloud
offerings you are looking to orchestrate.
• Explore edge architecture. Borrowing
from the days of SOA, consider describing
business capabilities and processes as
services. The goal is to connect enterprise
core, private, and public cloud offerings—
which can be broken into a common set of
services used to deliver on business needs.
This will lead to deliberate identification
and management of business rules, APIs,
identities and personas, entitlements,
workflow items, and interfaces. The goal is
to promote reuse, standards adoption, and
architectural integrity—from a business-
driven mindset. A revamped IT delivery
model will likely be needed, as will support
from both IT and business executives for a
new governance mindset.
Where do you start?
96

Bottom line
As enterprises use disparate cloud offerings to handle critical business processes, the desire to link
these offerings to core legacy systems and data grows. IT organizations will be asked to provide that
orchestration. A recent Gartner survey shows that “over 70 percent of organizations that are using or
planning to use cloud services expect internal IT organizations to assume the role of cloud services
broker.”10
That need has generated challenges that extend beyond integration to include security, data
integrity and reliability, and business rules for managing a hybrid state. It is also creating demand for
cloud orchestration to link multiple cloud services to each other—and to the core. CIOs who have
the disciplines of data management and integration architecture in place will be positioned to create
harmony out of the existing landscape and to leverage orchestration services when they arrive.
Authors
Andy Main, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Andy Main is Deloitte’s National Customer Solutions service
line leader and the Global Customer Solutions leader. In his
national leadership role, Main is charting new courses in cloud
computing, providing clients with more flexibility than before.
John Peto, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
As the US lead for the salesforce.com global alliance and a leader in
Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Customer Solutions practice, John Peto
focuses on helping companies transform the effectiveness of their sales,
service, and marketing functions through the implementation of new
processes and supporting application, integration, and data architectures.
Cloud orchestration
97

Endnotes
1. Stefan Ried, The Hybrid² integration challenge, Forrester Research, Inc., May 1, 2013,
http://www.forrester.com/The+Hybrid178+Integration+Challenge/
fulltext/-/E-RES94881, accessed December 31, 2013.
2. Ibid.
3. Deloitte Consulting LLP, Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business, 2012, chapter 5.
4. IDG Enterprise, Cloud computing: Key trends and future effects, June 27, 2013,
http://www.idgenterprise.com/report/cloud-research-2013, accessed December 31, 2013.
5. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for designing networked systems using
web protocols and technologies such as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and XML.
See Roy Fielding, Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures, 2000,
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm, chapter 5, accessed January 8, 2014.
6. Larry Dignan, “As the cloud turns, Salesforce, Workday integrate more,” ZDNet, Septem-
ber 18, 2013, http://www.zdnet.com/as-the-cloud-turns-salesforce-workday-integrate-
more-7000020841/, accessed December 19, 2013; Oracle, “Oracle, NetSuite, and Deloitte an-
nounce plans to deliver integrated HCM and ERP cloud services for mid-size customers,” press
release, http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1966087, accessed December 31, 2013.
7. Dell Boomi, Inc., “LinkedIn’s use of Dell Boomi (video),”
http://www.boomi.com/customers/success/linkedins-use-dell-boomi, accessed January 7, 2014.
8. IBM, “SunTrust Banks, Inc. improves access to accurate information,” June 11, 2013,
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/RNAE-98JKWH?Op
enDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us, accessed January 7, 2014.
9. MuleSoft, “Nespresso brews up growth, profits with new SOA-based strategy,”
http://www.mulesoft.com/case-study/nespresso#download, accessed January 7, 2014.
10. Michele Cantara, Hype cycle for cloud services brokerage 2013, Gartner, Inc., July 31, 2013
(revised October 28, 2013).
98

Data is exploding in size—with incredible
volumes of varying forms and structure—
and coming from inside and outside of your
company’s walls. No matter what the applica-
tion—on-premises or cloud, package or cus-
tom, transactional or analytical—data is at its
core. Any foundational change in how data is
stored, processed, and put to use is a big deal.
Welcome to the in-memory revolution.
With in-memory, companies can crunch
massive amounts of data, in real time, to
improve relationships with their customers—to
generate add-on sales and to price based on
demand. And it goes beyond customers: The
marketing team wants real-time modeling of
changes to sales campaigns. Operations wants
to adjust fulfillment and supply chain priorities
on the fly. Internal audit wants real-time
fraud and threat detection. Human resources
wants to continuously understand employee
retention risks. And there will likely be a lot
more as we learn how lightning-fast data
analysis can change how we operate.
An evolution of data’s backbone
Traditionally, data has been stored on
spinning discs—magnetic, optical, electronic,
or other media—well suited for structured,
largely homogeneous information requiring
ACID1
transaction processing. In-memory
technologies are changing that core
architecture—replacing spinning discs with
random access memory (RAM) and fueling
a shift from row-based to column-based
data storage. By removing the overhead of
disc I/O, performance can be immediately
enhanced. Vendor claims vary from thousand-
fold improvement in query response times2
to transaction processing speed increases
of 20,000 times.3
Beyond delivering raw
speed, in-memory responses are also more
predictable, able to handle large volumes and
a mix of structured, semi-structured, and
unstructured data. Column-based storage
allows for massive amounts of data of varying
structures to be promptly manipulated,
preventing redundant data elements from
being stored.
While the concept of in-memory is
decades old, the falling price of RAM and
growing use cases have led to a new focus on
the technology. CIOs can reduce total cost
of ownership because the shift from physical
to logical reduces the hardware footprint,
allowing more than 40 times the data to be
stored in the same finite space. That means
racks and spindles can be retired, data center
costs can be reduced, and energy use can be
slashed by up to 80 percent.4
Operating costs
In-memory revolution
An answer to big data
As in-memory technologies move from analytical to transactional systems,
the potential to fundamentally reshape business processes grows. Technical
upgrades of analytics and ERP engines may offer total cost of ownership
improvements, but potential also lies in using in-memory technologies to solve
tough business problems. CIOs can help the business identify new opportunities
and provide the platform for the resulting process transformation.
101

can also be cut both by reducing maintenance
needs and by streamlining the performance
of employees using the technology.5
In
addition, cloud options provide the possibility
of pivoting from fixed to variable expenses.
The bigger story, though, is how in-memory
technology shakes up business processes.
Beyond the technology
CIOs should short-circuit market
hype and determine which areas of their
business can take advantage of in-memory
technology. In last year’s Tech Trends report,
our “Reinventing the ERP Engine”6
chapter
asked a specific question: What would you do
differently if you could close your books in
seven seconds instead of seven days? Today,
with advances in in-memory technology, that
“what if” has become a reality that is driving
companies to consider both the costs of ERP
upgrades and the breakthrough benefits of
real-time operations.
Operational reporting and data
warehousing are easy targets for in-memory,
especially those with large (billion-plus-record)
datasets, complex joins, ad hoc querying needs,
and predictive analytics. Core processes with
long batch windows are also strong candidates:
planning and optimization jobs for pricing and
promotions, material requirements planning
(MRP), and sales forecasting. The sweet spot
is where massive amounts of data, complex
operations, and business challenges demanding
Infrastructure Finding data
In-memory
Disc-based disk storage
Data is mechanically
recorded on a spinning
disk—often on a large
array of networked
storage appliances.
main memory
Data is stored in the
machine’s main system
memory, allowing
in-line processing and
manipulation.
indirect For data to be read or
written, the correct address must
ﬁrst be found on the physical
disk, which is divided into
cylinders, blocks, and sectors.
Overhead for input/output (I/O)
activities causes delays to large
and/or complicated jobs.
direct Streamlined data
retrieval and processing; with no
mechanical parts, no movement
or alignment is involved.
102

real-time support collide. Functions
where the availability of instantaneous
information can improve decision quality—
telecommunications, network management,
point-of-sale solutions—are good candidates
for an in-memory solution. Over the next
24 months, some of the more important
conversations you’ll have will likely be about
in-memory technologies.
Not every workload will be affected equally,
and the transition period will see a hearty
mix of old and new technologies. We’re still
in the early stages of businesses rewiring
their processes to take advantage of the new
engine. Analytics will continue to see the lion’s
share of investment, with in-memory–fueled
insights layered on top of existing legacy
processes. Point technical upgrades will offer
incremental benefits without the complexity
of another round of process transformation.
And ERP vendors are still in the midst of
rewriting their applications to exploit the
in-memory revolution.
And while benefits exist today, even
more compelling scenarios are coming soon.
The holy grail is in sight: a single data store
supporting transactions and analytics. This is
great news for CIOs looking to simplify the
complexity of back-end integration and data
management. It’s even better news for end
users, with new experiences made possible by
the simplified, unified landscape.
Efﬁciency
Columnar
Relational
Structure
Record 1 Customer 1
Name
Product A
Product
#111111
ID
Open
Record 2 Customer 2 Product B #222222Closed
Record 3 Customer 3 Product C #333333Closed
Record 4 Customer 4 Product B #444444Open
Status
Customer 1
Customer 2
Customer 3
Customer 4
Record 1
Product A
Product B
Product C
Record 2
Open
Closed
Record 3
#111111
#222222
#333333
#444444
Record 4
oltp1
Row-based structure
suited for transactional
integrity and SQL-based
querying. Complex queries
and joins require tiered
processing, with staging of
intermediate results, leading
to more I/O overhead.
olap2
Data is organized by
attributes (what would be
columns in relational structure),
allowing compression, eased
aggregation and analytics,
and faster complex queries
across large data sets.
Footnotes: 1
online transaction processing. 2
online analytical processing.
103

Reinventing production planning
When a large aerospace and defense
company sought to uncover and overcome
challenges in its ability to deliver products on
time, the company turned to an in-memory-
based analytics platform.
By using descriptive statistics to determine
the root causes of the performance issues,
they discovered that only a small number
of the more than 50,000 assembly parts
delivered performance within 10 percent
of the company’s plan, uncovering the need
for more accurate data to fuel the planning
process. Additionally, performance variation
among component parts was high. By splitting
the bill of materials into delivery segments,
more advanced statistics could be generated,
allowing performance to be evaluated at the
individual part level.
Predictive models were then used to
determine the factors contributing to the
longer lead times. Subsequently, 35 unique
parts were identified as representing significant
risks to meeting delivery timelines. Clustering
analytics assigned these high-risk parts into 11
groups of performance improvement tactics.
Finally, predictive models were again run to
align performance targets and financial goals
with each of the tactics identified.
As a result of the diagnostics and actionable
insights generated by this analytics platform,
benefits valued in excess of $100 million were
achieved. In addition, reduced product lead
time, reduced inventory holding costs, and
a 45 percent increase in on-time delivery
were attained.
Drilling for better performance
Pacific Drilling, a leading ultra-deepwater
drilling contractor founded in 2008, grew
aggressively in its first few years. As a result,
IT was tasked with providing a state-of-
the-art platform for measuring company
performance. Additionally, Pacific Drilling’s
ERP system—implemented early on in the
company’s life—was due for an upgrade. The
company selected an approach that addressed
both projects, allowing it to keep pace with
expansion plans and gain a strategic edge with
its information system.
Pacific Drilling implemented a single
in-memory data platform for both advanced
analytics and its upgraded ERP system. On
this platform, the company was able to more
effectively run maintenance, procurement,
logistics, human resources, and finance
functionalities in its many remote locations. It
also could perform transactional and reporting
operations within one system in real time.
Business leaders are gaining insight, while IT
delivers reports and dashboards with reduced
time-to-value cycles.
With an in-memory solution, Pacific
Drilling can more effectively measure
performance and processes across the
enterprise, and is better positioned to
expand its business and competitiveness in
the industry.
104

Communicating at light-speed
In the telecommunications industry, the customer experience has historically been defined
through a series of disconnected, transactional-based interactions with either a call center or
retail store representative. Customers have likely witnessed frustrating experiences such as service
call transfers that require repeated explanations of the problem at hand; retail store interactions
conducted with little understanding of their needs; and inconsistency of products and offers across
different channels. While some companies may see this as a challenge, T-Mobile US, Inc. recognized
an opportunity to innovate its customer experience.
The challenge many companies face is a “siloed” view of customer interactions across traditional
marketing, sales, and service channels, as well as across emerging channels such as mobile
devices and social media. T-Mobile recognized the potential in connecting the dots across these
interactions and creating a unified customer experience across its channels, both traditional and
emerging. By shifting its customer engagement model from reactive to proactive, T-Mobile could
understand, predict, and mitigate potential customer issues before they occur and drive offers based
on an individual’s personal history (i.e., product usage, service issues, and buying potential). This
was certainly a tall order, but it was a compelling vision.
T-Mobile’s approach was to create a single view of customer interactions across channels. Each
time a customer interacts with T-Mobile, the company records a “touch,” and each time T-Mobile
corresponds with a customer, the company also records that as a touch—creating a series of touches
that, over time, resemble a conversation. The next time that T-Mobile and a customer interact, there
are no awkward exchanges: The conversation starts where it left off. And the collection of touches
can be used in real time to drive personalized pricing and promotions—through the web, on a
mobile device, or while talking to a call center agent.
The situation T-Mobile faced when getting started: Two terabytes of customer data, created just
in the last three months, stored in 15 separate systems with 50 different data types. Producing a
single, consumable view of a customer’s interaction history with the company’s existing systems
was likely impossible. Add the desire to perform advanced analytics, and it was clear the existing
systems could not support the effort. To address these technical limitations, T-Mobile implemented
an in-memory system that integrates multichannel sales, service, network, and social media data.
The powerful data engine, combined with a service-oriented architecture, allows T-Mobile to
capture customer interactions in a dynamic in-memory data model that accommodates the ever-
changing business and customer landscape. The in-memory capabilities enable the integration of
advanced customer analytics with a real-time decision engine to generate personalized experiences
such as a discount for purchasing a new device the customer is researching or an account credit
resulting from network issues impacting the customer.
T-Mobile’s multichannel customer view takes the guesswork out of providing “the next best
action” or “the next best offer” to customers. Data integration across traditional and emerging
channels allows T-Mobile to see the full picture of a customer’s experience so its employees can
proactively engage customers with the appropriate message at the appropriate time. The importance
of the customer experience has never been greater, and T-Mobile is shaking up the wireless industry
by eliminating customer pain points. Customers can take advantage of its no-annual-service-
contract Simple Choice Plan, an industry-leading device upgrade program, as well as unlimited
global data at no extra charge. By implementing an in-memory platform to better understand
its customers, T-Mobile continues to extend its competitive advantage with its differentiated
customer experience.
105

Next-generation ERP
With customers demanding reductions
in time-consuming workloads and
better performance of transactional and
informational data, ERP providers are looking
for ways to improve existing products or
introduce new ones. In-memory capabilities,
often used for analytics in the past, can give
vendors a way to address such concerns
and create core business offerings that were
previously unachievable. Both SAP and
Oracle provide technical upgrade paths from
recent releases.
To this end, Oracle announced the
release of 13 in-memory applications with a
performance improvement of 10- to 20-fold.7
Seven of these applications are new, intended
to make possible several business processes
previously deemed too intensive. Changes to
the algorithms of six legacy applications will
also allow in-memory versions to be created.8
Additionally, an in-memory option, intended
to double the speed of transaction processing,
has been added to the core 12c database.9
Similarly, SAP has shifted its core business
applications to an in-memory database and
has gained the participation of more than
450 customers as of October 2013.10
For
these customers, this shift could make real-
time financial planning possible, including
interactive analysis of vast amounts of data.11
The outcomes of immediate data-driven
decision making may soon be seen as adoption
of in-memory business applications continues.
106

My take
The in-memory movement is upon us and a
bevy of approaches are emerging to solve new
and existing business problems. So with the
goal of doing things “faster, better, cheaper,”
in-memory databases help to get you the
“faster”—with an opportunity for “better” and
“cheaper” when you use in-memory to tackle
business, not technical, problems.
From my perspective, mass-market in-memory
adoption is still in the early stages but poised to
gain momentum. While in-memory database
systems aren’t new per se, they are gaining in
popularity because of lower cost DRAM and
flash options. I think it has greater potential
than many recognize—and more known use
cases than many believe. The available products
still have room to mature in their development
lifecycles, and I think customers are looking
for pre-packaged, purpose-built applications
and platforms that show concrete benefit. I
think there is opportunity, however, for early-
adopting customers to lead the charge and gain
competitive advantage.
In-memory databases are database
management systems that use main memory
for computer data storage instead of disk
storage. This brings benefits such as faster
performance, faster response time, and reduced
modeling. Many industries, such as financial
services, telecommunications, and retail, have
used in-memory for trading systems, network
operations, and pricing. But as new modern
systems such as SAP’s HANA, Oracle’s Exalytics,
and a number of startups appear, the market
should expand in size. Moving in-memory from
specialized markets to mainstream adoption
means that many applications may need to
be rewritten to take advantage of the new
capabilities. SAP’s HANA database engine
supports analytic applications and transactional
systems. Oracle has released a number
of in-memory apps across its application
product portfolio.
My advice for companies is to start small.
Identify a few bounded, business-driven
opportunities for which in-memory technology
can be applied. Budgeting, planning, forecasting,
sales operations, and spreadsheet-driven models
are good places to start, in my view. Their
massive data volumes and large numbers of
variables can yield faster and more informed
decisions and likely lead to measurable
business impact. The idea here is to reduce
cycles and increase planning accuracy. By
allowing a deeper level of operational
detail to be included within the plan,
users can perform more what-if
scenario modeling iterations in
the same budgeting window.
This means insights can be put
to use without reengineering
the back-end core processes
and existing transactions can
be run with more valuable,
timely input. Among others,
Anaplan has released a cloud-
based planning and modeling
solution that was built with an
in-memory engine.
The extended ecosystem of ERP
vendors, independent software
vendors (ISVs), systems integrators,
and niche service providers are
working hard to close the gap between
in-memory’s potential and the current
state of the market. It will take time, and
the full potential is unlikely to be realized
until application stacks are rewritten to take
advantage of the new data structures and
computational scale that in-memory computing
provides. But—in-memory computing has the
potential to transform business.
Jason Maynard, software and cloud computing analyst,
Wells Fargo Securities
107

Vendors are making strategic bets in the
in-memory space. IBM and Microsoft
have built in-memory into DB2 and SQL
Server. A host of dedicated in-memory
products have emerged, from open source
platforms such as Hazelcast to Software AG’s
BigMemory to VMWare’s SQLFire.
But for many CIOs, the beachhead for
in-memory will come from ERP providers.
SAP continues to heavily invest in HANA,
moving from analytics applications to its core
transactional systems with Business Suite on
HANA. SAP is also creating an ecosystem for
developers to build adjacent applications on its
technology, suggesting that SAP’s HANA stack
may increase over the next few years.12
Oracle is likely making a similar bet on its
latest database, 12c, which adds in-memory
as an option to its traditional disc-based,
relational platform.13
While there will be
disruption and transition expenses, the
resulting systems will likely have a lower total
cost of ownership (TCO) and much higher
performance than today’s technology offers.
In addition, Oracle and SAP are pressing
forward to create extensive ecosystems of
related and compatible technologies. From
captive company-built applications to licensed
solutions from third parties, the future will
be full of breakout opportunities. Continuous
audits in finance. Real-time supply chain
performance management. Constant tracking
of employee satisfaction. Advanced point-
of-sale solutions in retail. Fraud and threat
detection. Sales campaign effectiveness.
Predictive workforce analytics. And more.
Functions that can benefit from processing
crazy amounts of data in real time can likely
benefit from in-memory solutions.
Vendors are pitching the benefits of the
technology infrastructure, with an emphasis
on real-time performance and TCO. That’s a
significant start, but the value can be so much
more. The true advantage of an in-memory
ecosystem is the new capabilities that can be
created across a wide range of functions. That’s
where businesses come in. Vendors are still on
the front end of product development, so now
is the time to make your requirements known.
• Start by understanding what you’ve
already bought. In-memory is an attractive
and invasive technology—a more effective
way of doing things. You may already have
instances where you’re using it. Assess the
current benefits and determine what more
you may need to spend to capitalize on its
real-time benefits.
• Push the vendors. Leading ERP vendors
are driving for breakthrough examples of
in-memory performance—and are looking
for killer applications across different
industries and process areas. Talk with your
sales reps. Get them thinking about—and
investing in—solutions you can use.
• Ask for roadmaps. Move past sales reps
to senior product development people at
vendors and systems integrators. Ask them
to help create detailed roadmaps you can
use to guide the future.
• First stop: analytics. You’ll likely find more
immediate opportunities around your
information agenda—fueling advanced
analytics. In-memory can be used to detect
correlations and patterns in very large
data sets in seconds, not days or weeks.
This allows for more iterations to be run,
drives “fast failing,” and leads to additional
insights and refined models, increasing the
quality of the analysis. These techniques
used to be reserved for PhD-level
statisticians—but not anymore.
Where do you start?
108

• Focus on one or two high-potential
capabilities. No company wants to conduct
open-heart surgery on its core ERP system.
Instead, pick a few priority functions
for your business to gain buy-in. Your
colleagues need to see the potential upside
before they’ll appreciate what a big deal
this is. Analytics is a good starting point
because it’s fairly contained. Customer
relationship management (CRM) is another
good match, with its focus on pricing agility
and promotion. After that, consider supply
chain and manufacturing.
• Watch competitors. Experimentation will
take place in many areas over the next
two years. If a competitor develops new
capabilities with demonstrated value in a
particular area, the dam will break and the
adoption curve will take off. Be ready for it.
Bottom line
Some technology trends explode onto the scene in a big way, rapidly disrupting business as
usual and triggering an avalanche of change. Others quietly emerge from the shadows, signaling
a small shift that builds over time. The in-memory revolution represents both. On the one hand,
the technology enables significant gains in speed, with analytics number-crunching and large-scale
transaction processing able to run concurrently. At the same time, this shift has opened the door to
real-time operations, with analytics insights informing transactional decisions at the individual level
in a virtuous cycle. The result? Opportunities for continuous performance improvement are emerging
in many business functions.
109

Authors
Mike Brown, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
With 20 years of experience in technology strategy and
planning, Mike Brown helps clients identify opportunities to
better leverage their technology and applications, especially
Oracle technology and enterprise applications.
Doug Krauss, specialist leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Doug Krauss is a specialist leader within Deloitte’s Information
Management practice. He has over 20 years of experience
in the business intelligence and data analytics space. He
also leads the SAP HANA innovation platform to support
client pilots, proof of concepts, and demonstrations.
110

Endnotes
1. ACID is an acronym for four rules for database transactional integrity: Atomic (ability to guarantee
either the completion of a unit of work, or roll back the system upon failure), Consistent (ensure updates
are applied everywhere—without violating any constraints or dependencies), Isolated (transactions
execute independently without interference), Durable (transactions are persistent once committed).
2. Neil McAllister, “Oracle’s Ellison talks up ‘ungodly speeds’ of in-memory data-
base. SAP: *Cough* Hana,” The Register, September 23, 2013, http://www.theregister.
co.uk/2013/09/23/openworld_ellison_keynote/, accessed January 2, 2014.
3. SAP, “SAP HANA® performance: Efficient speed and scale-out for real-time business intelligence,” https://
www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/downloadasset.sap-hana-performance-pdf.html, accessed January 2, 2014.
4. Eric Savitz, “IT revolution: How in-memory computing changes everything,” Forbes,
March 8, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/03/08/it-revolution-
how-in-memory-computing-changes-everything/, accessed January 2, 2014.
5. Oracle, “San Diego Unified School District harnesses attendance, procurement, and operational
data with Oracle Exalytics, generating $4.4 million in savings,” http://www.oracle.com/us/
corporate/customers/san-diego-usd-1-exalytics-cs-1865766.pdf, accessed January 2, 2014.
7. Oracle, “Oracle announces new in-memory applications and faster performance for all
Oracle applications on oracle engineered systems,” press release, April 9, 2013, http://
www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1931761, accessed January 13, 2014.
8. Doug Henschen, “Oracle in-memory apps: Hunting Hana,” InformationWeek, April 11,
2013, http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/oracle-
in-memory-apps-hunting-hana/d/d-id/1109489, accessed January 6, 2014.
9. Oracle, “Oracle announces Oracle database in-memory option to accelerate analytics,
data warehousing, reporting and OLTP,” press release, September 23, 2013, http://
www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2020717, accessed January 7, 2014.
10. Doug Henschen, “SAP sees payoff in cloud, Hana bets,” InformationWeek,
October 21, 2013, http://www.informationweek.com/enterprise/sap-sees-
payoff-in-cloud-hana-bets/d/d-id/1112011, accessed January 6, 2014.
11. Doug Henschen, “SAP vows Hana is ready to run ERP,” InformationWeek, May 16,
2013, http://www.informationweek.com/applications/sap-vows-hana-is-ready-
to-run-erp/d/d-id/1109979?page_number=2, accessed January 6, 2014.
12. Chris Preimesberger, “SAP moving all products to in-memory HANA database,” eWeek,
January 10, 2013, http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/sap-moving-all-products-to-
in-memory-hana-database/, accessed January 6, 2014; James Governor, “SAP consigns
everything pre-HANA to history. In-memory first development,” October 28, 2013, http://
redmonk.com/jgovernor/2013/10/28/4031/#ixzz2peS4OhMa, accessed January 6, 2014.
13. Alexander Wolfe, “Ellison unfurls in-memory database & big memory machine at Oracle OpenWorld,”
Forbes, September 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2013/09/23/ellison-unfurls-in-
memory-database-big-memory-machine-at-oracle-openworld/, accessed January 6, 2014.
111

When it comes to application
development (Dev), the business cares
about speed and quality. How fast can I get
what I want? How close will it be to what I
need? Contrast that with IT operations (Ops),
held accountable for response times, stability,
and efficiency, and focused on how to reduce
business disruptions at the lowest cost. These
are very different core missions that yield very
different behaviors. Dev is looking to compress
delivery cycles and adopt “experiment and
learn” mentalities. Ops is looking to institute
controls and more tightly govern change.
The fact that the “build” and “run” shops are
typically separate organizations only adds to
the divide.
Further complicating matters, both Dev
and Ops could each benefit from investments
in enabling technology—creating automated
capabilities in the business of IT akin to
what finance, manufacturing, and the supply
chain have invested in over the past decades.1
But even as requirements management,
system maintenance, and other disciplines
are upgraded, incremental investments in
disconnected activities will go only so far.
The real goal is to bridge the gap between
development and operations, supercharging
the investments that currently exist in
siloed automation by integrating the
end-to-end delivery model. Simply stated:
real-time DevOps.
Some companies have been using
automation to accelerate and improve steps in
their development processes for a while. But
many more have not. In fact, a recent survey
of 1,300 senior IT decision makers revealed
that only 39 percent had already invested in
pieces of DevOps.2
Complacent about their
time-tested, over-the-wall approaches to
software development, many IT organizations
have settled for manual, disjointed processes
that have rightly earned a reputation for
ineffectiveness and inefficiency.
It’s complicated
Complexity surrounds DevOps. From basic
design principles and defect tracking to release
management, configuration management, and
more, the interdependencies of the software
development lifecycle are real and complicated.
All the more reason to automate and integrate
the process.
The rise of agile is one of the factors driving
increased interest in real-time DevOps.
What was once seen as an experiment is now
mainstream, with more than 70 percent of
companies reporting at least partial agile
adoption.3
At its core, agile is about “test,
experiment, learn, and repeat.” It’s based on
Real-time DevOps
Empowering the business of IT
IT organizations need to better respond to business needs with speed and
agility. IT can likely improve the quality of its products and services by
standardizing and automating environment, build, release, and configuration
management—using tools like deployment managers, virtualization,
continuous integration servers, and automated build verification
testing. Popular in the agile world, DevOps capabilities are growing in
many IT organizations with either waterfall or agile methodologies.
Real-time DevOps
113

short sprints—typically one or two weeks—to
get to a potentially releasable product. That’s
instead of development cycles that last many
months or years.
Accelerated time to market is one possible
benefit, but just as important are the side
effects of better managing changing priorities
and improved alignment with the business.
Agile backlogs represent potential work to
be completed—stemming from new ideas,
unmet requirements, or enhancements and
fixes coming back from operations. Each
sprint sees the business sponsor (or product
owner, in agile parlance) re-establish priorities.
Development teams then tackle those items on
the top of the list.
Contrary to popular misconceptions,
agile development often requires a more
disciplined approach than traditional software
development methods. It can also provide
more transparency in the development
process—and real-time visibility into progress.
Iterative, rapid development begs for structure
and rigor, which are available through
the automated, integrated capabilities of
real-time DevOps.
Continuous build and continuous
integration are big parts of real-time DevOps.
Code is constantly being fed back into
configuration management and validated via
testing automation suites, giving developers
affirmation that quality is continuously
monitored, with dependencies managed
automatically in the background. Companies
gain the ability to automate technical
compliance and structural correctness, as well
as a continuous measure of how requirements
are being met.
Environment provisioning and
management is another opportunity area.
Traditionally, projects had to accept up-front
capital spend and ramp-up delays while
hardware and software were ordered, installed,
and configured. With the rise of virtualization,
cloud, and software-defined data centers,
this process can be largely automated: not
only procurement, but also configuration of
servers, networks, storage, operating systems,
platforms, applications, transactions, and
23%collaboration
22%app quality
22%customers
21%new services
20%time-to-market
19%revenue
18%cost savings
17%deploy frequency
The Dev
Innovates and
creates applications.
The beneﬁts of DevOps1
Percent improvement in business areas.
The Ops
Keeps infrastructure
running smoothly.
DevOps disciplines
Integrate and automate processes.
code
build
test
deploy
operate
Sources: 1
Computer Associates, "TechInsights report: What smart businesses know about DevOps," https://www.ca.com/us/register/forms/
collateral/techinsights-report-what-smart-businesses-know-about-devops.aspx, accessed January 3, 2014.
114

data—including the automated provisioning of
user accounts based on profile types.
Real-time DevOps also includes test
automation. When coupled with requirements
management, functional, user, and even
behavioral scenarios can be scripted for
automated quality assurance (QA). This
benefits development cycles and also serves
as the benchmark for regression scripts—
accelerating break/fix and maintenance
processes. For areas such as web and mobile
development, this might also include build-
verification services across devices and
operating systems—analyzing across an
increasingly fragmented landscape.
Where there’s a waterfall,
there’s a way
While agile is helping to showcase the
need for real-time DevOps, these concepts are
just as relevant for waterfall shops. Handoffs
and manual steps typically waste time in the
development process. Collapsing the time
it takes to develop software, and creating
more thoughtful linkages to operations, are
universal benefits.
Also, real-time DevOps does not mean
that existing Information Technology
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and governance
processes need to be scuttled. Indeed, IT
service management should have a more
explicit link to software development across
the lifecycle, with identified issues fed into
the backlog for prioritization. Ongoing
patching and infrastructure upkeep should
still be done, and with real-time DevOps,
it will likely be better coordinated with
development. Improving outage recovery and
minimizing release fail rates are expected
outcomes from real-time DevOps—as well as
expedited code deployments and improved
developer throughput.
Real-time DevOps is not a tool, though
tools make it workable. And it’s not only about
agile, though agile practices have brought the
benefits to light. Instead, real-time DevOps is
a process shift that changes the cadence of how
much can be done—and in how much time.
Production failure recovery time2
traditional
devops
30%
41%
0-30 minutes
traditional
devops
22%
30%
31-60 minutes
traditional
devops
40%
22%
60+ minutes Deployment duration2
devops 36.3 mins.
traditional 85.1 mins.
Deployment frequency3
On demand
Weekly to monthly Monthly or longer
Once daily to once weekly
devops implemented >12 months
27%
devops not implemented
8%
2
ZeroTurnaround, "Rebel Labs IT ops & DevOps productivity report 2013," April 9, 2013, http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/rebel-labs-release-
it-ops-devops-productivity-report-2013, accessed January 6, 2014. 3
Puppet Labs, “2013 DevOps report,”March 2013, http://info.puppetlabs.com/
2013-state-of-devops-report.html, accessed January 6, 2014.
Real-time DevOps
115

Moving at the speed
of commerce
John Lewis PLC, a UK-based retailer with
40 department stores, replaced its customer-
facing e-commerce platform in early 2013.
This was a complex project involving a team of
over 100 employees and consultants working
across multiple systems: web storefront, web
management, product management, and
delivery management. To support this project,
multiple development environments were
used. Each one was carefully managed to
support its respective development stream.
Code was then deployed across many
additional environments: system testing,
integration, performance, training, and
ultimately production.
To meet the project’s pace and flexibility
demands, John Lewis focused on DevOps
and took measures to increase the frequency
and richness of communications between the
development and project operations teams,
resulting in a prioritized list of DevOps-related
enhancements. Many of these took the form
of process automation in order to improve
reliability, repeatability, and speed.
Since the go-live in early 2013, the company
has continued to develop and refine its DevOps
processes, focusing on efficiency and reliability.
Automation has continued to be a main theme:
Automated browser-based functional tests
have been adapted so that they can be used
on larger, fully integrated environments as
both smoke and regression test suites. With
real-time DevOps practices in place, John
Lewis can now deliver one complete (back-
and front-end) release per month. Previously,
releases were only carried out every six to
eight weeks.
With the positive results from using real-
time DevOps practices on the e-commerce
project, John Lewis is now expanding these
practices to other projects, scaling the
operation and creating a clear delivery and
project operations team for the enterprise.
Additionally, the company is looking to
orchestrate its automated processes, enabling
an end-to-end, “one click” deployment across
multiple systems.
Supporting IT’s health
and well-being
The state of West Virginia’s Department
of Health and Human Resources (DHHR)
administers programs that benefit its citizens,
such as cash assistance, food stamps, and
Medicaid. In support of this mission, the
department depends on an integrated solution
made up of more than 30 subsystems providing
case management, eligibility determination,
and benefits issuance functionality.
Given the breadth of business functionality,
the size of the solution, and ongoing changes
resulting from federal mandates, DHHR
wanted an application development and
maintenance process that could efficiently
support multiple, parallel initiatives. To meet
this objective, the organization implemented
a schedule of weekly patches and monthly
enhancement releases supported by an
automated build and deployment process.
DHHR’s DevOps program included
multiple integrated, automated components
such as defect and change request tracking,
build and deployment, smoke testing,
116

and regression testing. Additionally, the
organization created an administration
dashboard to schedule, manage, and track
builds throughout the release cycle. By
integrating its defect and change request
tracking with automated build and test utilities,
DHHR is able to build only those components
tied to tested defect fixes or enhancements—
preventing untested components from being
migrated to higher environments.
As a result of implementing real-time
DevOps, DHHR has increased the success rate
of software builds by 58 percent. Additionally,
the processes have improved the software
quality, which means DHHR’s production
rollback plan is gathering dust on the shelf.
A healthy dose of collaboration
For a leading health plan, history seemed
to repeat itself whenever the company adopted
new technologies: The lack of communication
across its enterprise resulted in significant
delays in delivering new business solutions.
Collaboration between operations and
testing didn’t occur until the late stages
of implementation, and development
often proceeded without a holistic view of
business requirements. To make matters
more challenging, the core implementation
teams—operations, requirements, delivery,
and testing—were geographically dispersed
across multiple locations, both onshore and
offshore. As a result, the health plan sought a
real-time DevOps and agile/Lean IT approach
to streamline communication across the
enterprise and accelerate delivery of new
business solutions to its users.
The transition to real-time DevOps and
agile/Lean IT began by integrating the business
functions into a single enterprise environment,
creating cohesion from the initial stages
of requirements gathering through final
deployment. The organization introduced
automated processes to build, test, and
deploy systems, allowing users to see material
progress in four- to six-week release cycles.
The process resulted in an efficiency gain of
over 50 percent by reducing unproductive wait
times throughout the project life cycle, such as
by enabling a reduction in the test execution
window. There was an increase in overall
delivery effectiveness, providing a higher
degree of business consistency, flexibility,
quality, and satisfaction. When talking about
deployment, teams now look at their watches,
instead of the calendar.
Real-time DevOps
117

A new policy for IT
A leading insurance company with a highly distributed IT organization comprising both
internal and external resources started a journey to centralize its infrastructure, creating a services
company construct. As part of that effort, the company internalized resources, created a more
direct reporting structure to the CIO, and implemented a centralized application development
group (ADG) of approximately 5,000 people.
One of the goals of implementing the ADG was to jump-start the company’s transition to
an agile development organization. As development projects transition into the ADG, they are
implemented using an agile methodology. Organization-wide, about 25 percent of development at
the company is currently delivered by the ADG using agile. The transition to the ADG has enabled
a renewed focus on DevOps and on the goals of standardization, automation, and integration.
Each of the company’s key infrastructure platforms was at varying stages of automation and
integration. Real-time DevOps first took hold in two separate virtualized environments that
already shared many common elements. As applications were built into those environments, their
configurations were standardized. This allowed the company to automate more of its DevOps
processes—environment provisioning, release management, system monitoring, and others.
Efforts are underway to expand the standardization and automation of the company’s platforms
and processes—and to integrate the various capabilities.
One of the ADG’s goals is to continually improve its delivery of what the business wants,
which can drive heavy application complexity. With the IT organization moving from a catalog
of distinct and separate parts to a service-based model, its approach to building applications has
changed accordingly. The ADG is standardizing infrastructure components and applications
and is working to automate even more of the work that comes in the door. The company is also
looking into which service levels are needed by classifying applications into gold, silver, and
bronze categories.
For the company’s leadership, engaging its in-house workforce is a priority. DevOps
had a strong, positive impact on relationships within the IT department—in particular, the
infrastructure team and the ADG. The intangible benefits of improved collaboration and teaming
are valued as much as increased quality of work, cost reduction, or reduced development times.
DevOps is also a building block for better partnering between the business and IT.
In this effort, the company realized that the IT organization could not get to a service-based
relationship with the business if it didn’t have a service-based model in place. Leadership knew
that it was important to map what it did in IT to what the business actually does for its customers.
By getting that foundation in place, IT and the business could start having conversations at a
higher level.
118

My take
I’m an unapologetic DevOps geek. As vice
president of technology in the PTA at my
son’s school last year, I built its website and
set up real-time monitoring and automated
management processes on a virtual machine the
site lived on. It was total overkill for such a small
website, but I had fun doing it. With the ease of
use and price point of tools, even a kindergarten
class can take advantage of real-time DevOps.
At FOX Sports, we are actively building out
DevOps and continuous integration. We use
Jenkins for the automated build process, which
is essentially the beginning of continuous
integration for us. We’re also working on quality
assurance automation so we can arrive at the
point where we are creating an environment
that has been tested and deployed—
automatically. The next step will be broader
testing automation starting with unit and
regression testing. We’ll draw a line somewhere;
you risk automation overkill if you go too far.
But we’re not there yet.
In my role, DevOps is about having the
information needed to make informed decisions.
A large part of that is the combination of real-
time monitoring approaches and mechanisms
for teams to communicate. Monitoring can
tell you a lot. If you see a spike in website
traffic, you can easily pinpoint it and figure
out what’s going on. It might be a good
thing like a surge in user activity or it could
be because of a defect from a recent build or
infrastructure maintenance. Early indicators let
me take action—hopefully before the business
is affected.
Enabling DevOps was driven by both business
and technical needs for us. We needed to make
process improvements in order to meet our
goals for creating leading, timely content. We’re
driven by the sports calendar—it makes for lots
of hard deadlines and constant activity. This
year, the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics
opening ceremony fall within the same week—
and we’ll be up for the challenge.
Our strategy for DevOps is ever-changing
here at FOX Sports as technologies grow and
we learn. Bettering the number of features
delivered, turnaround time to get a new
environment provisioned, and mean time
to repair defects are examples of expected
outcomes. Currently we can support a build
every 30 minutes, and we’re taking lessons from
our current processes to inform our next steps.
My advice for others is to employ
DevOps. Look at the data. Get started
with continuous integration. Look
at your current deployment
process—and consider the
hours your team is spending to
deploy and test code. DevOps
requires an investment up
front, but pays dividends in
the long run. Over time, you
can simply make tweaks to
the process and keep rolling
out code and testing in an
automated fashion.
Not only do I recommend it,
but I think it has become the
rule, not the exception. A little
work up front can save significant
effort across the board.
Ben Gerst, senior vice president of platform and product development,
FOX Sports
Real-time DevOps
119

While there are many opportunities to
make a shift to real-time DevOps, there are
some places where you likely can’t live without
it: mobile, social, and big data. In these fast-
growing spaces, disjointed, bottleneck-ridden
development processes can undermine your
efforts. Unless you can find a way to accelerate
without sacrificing quality—and real-time
DevOps is likely that way—you’ll find yourself
out of the loop as the business bypasses IT by
going directly to the marketplace.
• Establish the need. Conduct your
own benchmarking to identify delays
and waste in the software development
process. Uncover how much time is spent
on manual document capture, build
management, build verification, release
planning, and test script development.
These are opportunities for action.
• Build new skills. Tool configuration and
scripting skills are a part of the equation,
used to drive version control, configuration
management, test harnesses, ticketing,
environment provisioning, and system
maintenance and monitoring. But soft
skills are just as essential for real-time
DevOps to take hold. Team members will
be collaborating with the business, program
and project managers, developers, testers,
and the operations teams. Make sure your
core team isn’t simply making the new
technologies adhere to how things have
historically been done.
• Employ services thinking. For real-time
DevOps to be viable with legacy ERP and
large-scale custom solutions, break down
complex systems into components and
modular services. This allows for rapid
incremental changes within monolithic
code bases—and sets up the organization
for a broader modernization play.
• Lay down the bases. Once you understand
the pain points within your organization,
begin automating individual components.
Establish a continuous integration build
server for your developers, create a small
“smoke test” suite of cases to validate builds,
and implement a release automation tool.
Also, look to add automation within your
development, test, and infrastructure tracks
in parallel with similar, discrete steps.
• Connect the dots. Once you have some of
the automation components in place, look
for ways to link them into a single stream
that can shorten cycles. Not just integration
between requirements, but continuous
integration—linking to build, to defect
tracking, to configuration management,
and to release management. In this model,
the handoffs and touch points happen
seamlessly in the background.
• Get vendors on board. The opportunity to
learn from and build on vendor successes
in real-time DevOps is an important way
to accelerate your own improvements. You
may want to avoid outsourcing agreements
with vendors who aren’t using automation
as an accelerator.
• Make the leap to test-driven design—or
even behavior-driven design. Real-time
DevOps enables you to move from build-
to-run to build-to-verify. This natural
evolution leads to design for end-user
engagement. That’s where contractors
and vendors that provide application
development and maintenance (ADM) and/
or application management services (AMS)
can help you improve.
• Look beyond cost and speed. Embrace the
lower costs and greater speed that come
Where do you start?
120

with real-time DevOps, but recognize
that more substantial benefits are also
possible. If you believe that your technology
delivery model can benefit from real-time
DevOps, it’s time to get teams delivering
against your priorities with a much more
compressed cadence.
• Commit. Too many companies dabble in
this world—acquiring tools and adopting
some of the terminology, but without
making hard changes to their operating and
delivery models. If there is a case for real-
time DevOps, don’t fall for one-off, surface-
level investments. Or if you do, don’t be
surprised if you get unremarkable results.
Bottom line
Individual tools for automating the software development lifecycle, maintenance, and monitoring
have been available for years, and many companies have been taking advantage of them effectively. Yet
few have taken the next step to integrate the pieces and commit to a new cadence of development and
operations. That’s because the concept of real-time DevOps is only partially understood. In a recent
survey, Gartner “found that only one-third of companies surveyed were either in-process or planning
to implement DevOps, and close to 44 percent of respondents were still trying to figure out what
DevOps means.”4
Early adopters have the opportunity to profoundly improve their IT shops—accelerating IT
delivery, improving quality, and better aligning with their businesses. Arm IT with the tools to
automate and integrate their core disciplines, and the cobbler’s children will finally have new shoes.
Real-time DevOps
121

Endnotes
2. Computer Associates, “TechInsights report: What smart businesses know about De-
vOps,” https://www.ca.com/us/register/forms/collateral/techinsights-report-what-
smart-businesses-know-about-devops.aspx, accessed January 3, 2014.
3. Lori MacVittie, “IT cause and effect: Applications are money,” InformationWeek,
August 13, 2013, http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/it-cause-and-
effect-applications-are-money/d/d-id/1111158?, accessed January 3, 2014.
4. Laurie F. Wurster et al., “Emerging Technology Analysis: DevOps a cul-
ture shift, not a technology,” Gartner, Inc., August 8, 2013.
Authors
Ayan Chatterjee, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Ayan Chatterjee leads Deloitte’s Application Management Services
service line for the health care providers, health plans, and life sciences
industries. He advises clients on ways to gain efficiencies and reduce
costs in managing their applications using a globally distributed model.
Alejandro Danylyszyn, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Alejandro Danylyszyn is a leader in Deloitte Digital, helping
clients achieve results through the implementation of e-commerce,
digital content/asset management, and multi-channel solutions—
from strategy to deployment, following agile techniques.
122

Each year, this report analyzes trends in
technology put to business use. To be
included, a topic should clearly demonstrate
its potential to impact businesses in the next
18 to 24 months. We also require a handful
of concrete examples that demonstrate how
organizations have put the trend to work—
either as early adoption of the concept
or “bread crumbs” that point toward the
fully realized opportunity. Our criteria for
choosing trends keeps us on the practical
side of provocative, as each trend is relevant
today and exhibits clear, growing momentum.
We encourage executives to explore these
concepts and feed them into this year’s
planning cycle. Not every topic warrants
immediate investment. However, enough have
demonstrated potential impact to justify a
deeper look.
Because we focus on the nearer-term
horizon, our Technology Trends report typically
only hints at broader disruptive technology
forces. This year, in collaboration with
leading researchers at Singularity University,
we have added this section on exponential
technologies. The fields we chose to cover
have far-reaching, transformative impact and
represent the elemental advances that have
formed technology trends both this year
and in the past. In this section, we explore
five exponentials with wide-ranging impact
across geographies and industries: artificial
intelligence, robotics, cyber security, additive
manufacturing, and advanced computing.
In these pages we provide a high-level
introduction to each exponential—a snapshot
of what it is, where it comes from, and where
it’s going. Each exponential stems from many
fields of study and torrents of research. Our
goal is to drive awareness and inspire our
readers to learn more. Even if the impact of
an exponential is more than 24 months away,
executives can begin contemplating how their
organizations can embrace its force to drive
innovation—and how it may disrupt their
industry as maturity and adoption accelerates.
Exponentials represent unprecedented
opportunities as well as existential threats.
Don’t get caught unaware—or unprepared.
Exponentials
One more thing . . .
Exponentials
125

My take
In 2012 the world experienced what I call “the new Kodak moment.” A moment in time when an
exponential technology put a linear thinking company out of business. Kodak, the company that
invented the digital camera in 1976, and had grown to a 145,000-person1
, 28-billion-dollar global
company at its peak, ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2012 as it was put out of business by the
exponential technology of digital imagery. In stark contrast, another company—also in the digital
imagery business—called Instagram, was acquired in that same year by Facebook for $1 billion.
Instagram’s headcount: 13 employees.
These moments are going to be the norm as exponentially thinking startups replace
linear businesses with unprecedented products and services. Although a daunting
challenge, exponential technologies offer extraordinary opportunities to the
businesses that can keep pace with them.
The lessons learned from Kodak are the consequences of failing to keep
up with what I call the “six Ds.” The first D is digitization. Technology that
becomes digitized hops on Moore’s Law and begins its march up the
exponential growth curve. Like many companies, Kodak was blindsided by
the next D—deceptive growth. When a product, such as imagery, becomes
digitized, it jumps from a linear path to an exponential trajectory. The
challenge is that early exponential doublings are deceptive. The first Kodak
digital camera was only 0.01 megapixels. Even though it was doubling every
year, when you double 0.01, to 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.16, this doubling of small
numbers near zero looks to the mind like linear growth, and is dismissed. It’s
only when you continue forward past what is called the “knee of the curve”
that it begins to change. Double seven times from “1” and you get to 128.
Twenty-three more doublings (a total of 30) gets you to 1 billion. Business leaders
often perceive the early stages as slow, linear progress. Until, of course, the trend
hits the third D—disruption.
By the time a company’s product or service is disrupted, it is difficult to catch up. Disruptive
growth ultimately leads to the last three Ds—dematerialization, demonetization, and
democratization, which can fundamentally change the market. The smartphone in your pocket
has dematerialized many physical products by providing their virtual equivalents—a GPS receiver
in your car, books, music, and even flashlights. Once these equivalents gain market traction, the
established product’s commercial value can plummet. It becomes demonetized. iTunes®
,2
for example,
is impacting the value of record stores. eBay is doing the same to specialty retailers. Craigslist has
stripped newspapers of classified advertising revenue. Once products become dematerialized and
demonetized, they become democratized—spreading around the world through the billions of
connected devices we carry around.
Peter H. Diamandis, MD
Co-founder and executive chairman, Singularity University
Chairman & CEO, XPRIZE Foundation
Author, Abundance: The future is better than you think
126

Many business leaders confront exponentials with a stress mindset. They realize that the odds of
survival aren’t great. Babson College noted that 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in 2000
didn’t exist 10 years later.3
However, the other side of the coin is an abundance mindset—awareness
of the limitless opportunity. Between now and 2020, the world’s population of digitally connected
people will jump from two to five billion.4
That growth will also add tens of trillions of dollars in
economic value.
To land on the opportunity side of the coin and avoid shocks down the road, companies
can take two immediate steps:
• Conduct an impact assessment: Identify the top five strengths that
differentiate your company. Then look at which exponentials could potentially
erode those strengths. Also look at the flip side. What are the top five pain
points that exponentials could eliminate? How?
• Evaluate the threat: Determine how your company’s products
or services could be dematerialized or demonetized. Exploiting market
adjacencies is a key part of the equation. Google, for example, is focusing
on autonomous cars and Microsoft continues to make forays into gaming.
The goal is to not only figure out who might disrupt your business’s pond
but whose pond your company can disrupt.
Your competition is no longer multinational powerhouses in China or India.
Your competition now is the hyper-connected startup anywhere in the world
that is using exponential technologies to dematerialize and demonetize your
products and services. Someone in New York can upload a new idea into the
cloud, where a kid in Mumbai builds on it and hands it off to a Bangladeshi
company to handle production and marketing. Companies need to make sure their
plans are in sync with this world and its dynamics.
Lastly, companies should consider their strategy in the context of leveraging two types
of exponentials: First, pure exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic
biology, robotics, and 3D printing; and second, what I call “exponential crowd tools”: crowdsourcing,
crowdfunding, and prized-based competition incentive models. If companies then marry this portfolio
of exponential assets with the understanding that today’s grandest societal and planet challenges are
also today’s most promising commercial market opportunities, it can truly be a formula for abundance.
Exponentials
127

Artificial intelligence
Computer science researchers have been
studying Artificial Intelligence (AI) since
John McCarthy introduced the term in 1955.5
Defined loosely as the science of making
intelligent machines, AI can cover a wide range
of techniques, including machine learning,
deep learning, probabilistic inference, neural
network simulation, pattern analysis, decision
trees and random forests, and others. For our
purposes, we focus on how AI can simulate
reasoning, develop knowledge, and allow
computers to set and achieve goals.
The ubiquity and low-cost access to
distributed and cloud computing have fueled
the maturity of AI techniques. AI tools are
becoming more powerful and simpler to use.
This maturity is the first part of the story:
how AI is becoming democratized and can
be applied across industries, not just in areas
such as credit card processing and trading
desks, where AI has been gainfully employed
for 45 years. The next part of the story focuses
on our desire to augment and enhance
human intelligence.
We are increasingly overwhelmed by the
flood of data in our lives—1.8 zettabytes of
information are being created annually.6
But
we are saddled with an ancient computing
architecture that hasn’t seen a major upgrade
in more than 50,000 years: the brain. We suffer
from cognitive biases and limitations that
restrict the amount of information we can
process and the complexity of calculations we
can entertain. People are also susceptible to
affectations and social perceptions that can
muddy logic—anchoring on first impressions
to confirm suspicions instead of testing
divergent thinking.
AI can help solve specific challenges such
as improving the accuracy of predictions,
accelerating problem solving, and automating
administrative tasks. The reality is that with the
right techniques and training, many jobs can
be automated. That automation is underway
through many applications in several fields,
including advanced manufacturing, self-
driving vehicles, and self-regulating machines.
In addition, the legal profession is availing
itself of AI in everything from discovery
to litigation support. DARPA is turning to
AI to improve military air traffic control as
automated, self-piloted aircraft threaten to
overrun air-spaces. In health care, AI is being
used in both triage and administrative policies.
The world’s first synthetic bacterium was
created using AI techniques with sequencing.7
Energy firms are using AI for micro-fossil
exploration in deep oil preserves at the bottom
of the ocean. AI can also be leveraged for
situational assistance and logistics planning for
military campaigns or mass relief programs.
In sum, AI represents a shift, a move from
computers as tools for executing tasks to a
team member that helps guide thinking and
can do work.
Despite these successes, many of today’s
efforts focus on specific, niche tasks where
machine learning is combined with task and
domain knowledge. When we add biologically
inspired computing architectures, the ability
to reason, infer, understand context, develop
evolving conceptual models of cognitive
systems, and perform many different flavors of
tasks becomes attainable.
In the meantime, AI faces barriers to
its widespread adoption. Recognize that in
developed nations, its use may encounter
obstacles, especially as labor organizations
Exponential snapshots
128

fight its increased use and its potential to
decrease employment. The ethics of AI are
also rightly a focus of attention, including the
need for safeguards, transparency, liability
determination, and other guidelines and
mechanisms that steer toward responsible
adoption of AI. But these realities should not
curb the willingness to explore. Companies
should experiment and challenge assumptions
by seeking out areas where seemingly
unachievable productivity could positively
disrupt their businesses.
Inspired by lectures given by Neil
Jacobstein, artificial intelligence and
robotics co-chair, Singularity University
Neil Jacobstein co-chairs the artificial
intelligence and robotics track at Singularity
University. He served as president of
Singularity University from October 2010 to
October 2011 and worked as a technical
consultant on AI research for a variety of
businesses and government agencies.
Robotics
Mechanical devices that can perform both
simple and complex tasks have been a pursuit
of mankind for thousands of years. Artificial
intelligence and exponential improvements in
technology have fueled advances in modern
robotics through tremendous power, a
shrinking footprint, and plummeting costs.
Sensors are a prime example. Those that
guided the space shuttle in the 1970s were the
size of foot lockers and cost approximately
$200,000. Today, they are the size of a
fingernail, cost about 10 cents, and are far
more reliable.
Robotics is fundamentally changing the
nature of work. Every job could potentially be
affected—it’s only a matter of when. Menial
tasks were the early frontiers. Assembly
lines, warehouses, and cargo bays have been
enterprise beachheads of robotics. But that
was only the beginning. Autonomous drones
have become standard currency in militaries,
first for surveillance and now with weapon
payloads. Amazon fulfillment centers are
largely automated, with robots picking,
packing, and shipping in more than 18 million
square feet of warehouses.8
The next frontier
is tasks that involve gathering and interpreting
data in real time. Eventually these tasks can be
replaced by a machine, threatening entire job
categories with obsolescence. Oxford Martin
research predicts that 45 percent of US jobs
will be automated in the next 20 years.9
On the not-so-distant horizon, for example,
gastroenterologists won’t need to perform
colonoscopies. Patients will be able to ingest
a pill-sized device with a camera that knows
what to look for, photograph and, potentially,
attack diseases or inject new DNA. Boston
Dynamics is rolling out Big Dog, Bigger Dog,
and Cheetah—robots that can carry cargo over
uneven terrain in dangerous surroundings.
Exoskeletons can create superhuman strength
or restore motor functions in the disabled.
Remote health care is coming. It will likely
arrive first with robotics-assisted virtual
consultation, followed by surgical robots that
can interpret and translate a surgeon’s hand
movements into precise robotic movements
thousands of miles away. Companies are also
pursuing autonomous cars. Personal drone-
based deliveries could disrupt retail. The limits
are our imaginations—but not for long.
Robotics should be on many companies’
radars, but businesses should expect workplace
tension. To ease concerns, companies should
target initial forays into repetitive, unpleasant
work. Too often robotics is focused on
tasks that people enjoy. Equally important,
companies should prepare for the inevitable
job losses. Enterprises should identify
positions that aren’t likely to exist in 10 years,
and leverage attrition and training to prepare
employees for new roles. The challenge for
business—and society as a whole—is to drive
job creation at the same time that technology
is making many jobs redundant. Ideally,
displaced resources can be deployed in roles
requiring creativity and human interaction—a
dimension technology can’t replicate. Think
of pharmacists. After as much as eight years
of education, they spend the majority of their
Exponentials
129

time putting pills into bottles and manually
assessing complex drug interactions. When
those functions are performed by robots,
pharmacists can become more powerful
partners to physicians by understanding a
patient’s individual situation and modifying
drug regimens accordingly.
At the end of the day, there are two
things robots can’t help us with. The first
is preservation of the human species, a
concern more civic and philosophical than
organizational. But the second is more
practical—indefinable problems. For example,
robots can’t find life on Mars because we don’t
know what it might look like. Everything else is
fair game. Be ready to open the pod bay doors
of opportunity—before your competition does.
Inspired by lectures given by Dan Barry,
artificial intelligence and robotics co-chair,
Dan Barry is a former NASA astronaut
and a veteran of three space flights,
four spacewalks, and two trips to the
International Space Station. He is a licensed
physician and his research interests include
robotics, signal processing with an emphasis
on joint time-frequency methods, and human
adaptation to extreme environments.
Cyber security
A few hundred years ago, a robbery
consisted primarily of a criminal and an
individual victim—a highly personal endeavor
with limited options for growth. The advent
of railroads and banks provided opportunities
to scale, allowing marauders to rob several
hundred people in a single heist. Today, cyber
criminals have achieved astonishing scale.
They can attack millions of individuals at one
time with limited risk and exposure.
The same technological advances and
entrepreneurial acumen that are creating
opportunities for business are also arming the
world’s criminals. Criminal organizations are
employing an increasing number of highly
educated hackers who find motivation in the
challenges of cracking sophisticated cyber
security systems.10
These entrepreneurial
outlaws are a new crime paradigm that
is reaching frightening levels of scale
and efficiency.
A few examples illustrate the daunting
landscape: Hackers are available for hire online
and also sell software capable of committing
their crimes. A few years ago, for example,
INTERPOL caught a Brazilian crime syndicate
selling DVD software that could steal customer
identities and banking information. The
purveyors guaranteed that 80 percent of the
credit card numbers pilfered through the
software would be valid. Its customers could
also contact a call center for support.
Cyber criminals are also leveraging the
crowd. Flash Robs, for example, are becoming
a new craze where social media is used to
bring individuals to a specific store to steal
goods before police can arrive. Another
crowdsourced crime looted $45 million from a
pre-paid debit card network. Hackers removed
the card limits. Thieves then bought debit cards
for $10 and withdrew what they wanted. In just
10 hours, the crowd made more than 36,000
withdrawals in 27 countries.
What looms on the horizon is even more
daunting. With the Internet of Things, every
car, consumer appliance, and piece of office
equipment could be linked and ready for
hacking. As fingerprints become the standard
means of authentication, biometrics will
become a powerful source of ingenious theft.
The experience of the US Chamber
of Commerce portends the future. The
organization’s photocopiers, like many, are
equipped with hard drives that store printed
documents. In the past, industrial criminals
disguised as repairmen removed the devices.
However, when the chamber installed
thermostats connected to the Internet, hackers
could breach the copiers. Officials only
discovered the attack through a defect that
inadvertently sent the hackers’ documents to
the copiers.
There are steps that companies can take
to combat cybercrime. The first is to establish
risk-prioritized controls that protect against
130

known and emerging threats while complying
with standards and regulations. Companies
should also identify which of their assets would
likely attract criminals and assess the impact
of a theft or breach. Organizations should
then become vigilant and establish situation
risk and threat awareness programs across the
environment. Security and information event
management capabilities can be enhanced and
new functionality can be mined from tools
including endpoint protection, vulnerability
assessment/patch management, content
monitoring, data loss prevention, intrusion
prevention, and core network services. The
final step is building resilience: the ability to
handle critical incidents, quickly return to
normal operations, and repair damage done to
the business.
Companies can also turn to the crowd.
Security professionals have knowledge that
can help investigations and warn of potential
threats. The legal environment is also
important. Business leaders should advocate
for laws and policies that seek to contain
cybercrime and also avail themselves of
resources provided by federal agencies.
Cybercrime is accelerating at an
exponential pace. In the not-so-distant
future, everything from our watches to the
EKG monitors in hospitals will be connected
to the Internet and ready to be hacked.
Companies should be prepared to survive
in an environment where these threats
are commonplace.
Inspired by lectures given by Marc
Goodman, chair for policy, law, and ethics
and global security advisor, Singularity
University
Marc Goodman is a global strategist, author,
and consultant focused on the disruptive
impact of advancing technologies on
security, business, and international affairs. At
Singularity University, he serves as the faculty
chair for policy, law, and ethics and the
global security advisor, examining the use of
advanced science and technology to address
humanity’s grand challenges.
Additive manufacturing
The technology that supports additive
manufacturing, or 3D printing, is more than 30
years old. Its recent popularity has been fueled
in part by patent expirations which are driving
a wave of consumer-oriented printers. Prices
have fallen, putting the technology within
the reach of early adopters. 3D printing is
democratizing the manufacturing process and
bringing about a fundamental change in what
we can design and what we can create.
But the story goes much deeper than
hobbyists and desktop models. The cost of
a 3D printer ranges from a few hundred
to a few million dollars. The machines can
print with hundreds of materials, including
nylons, plastics, composites, fully dense
metals, rubber-like materials, circuit boards,
and even genetic tissue. Breakthroughs in
speed, resolution, and reliability demonstrate
potential not only for scale but also for
unlocking new possibilities.
The real exponential impact, however, is
in the simplicity of the supporting tools. They
provide a means to digitize existing objects,
customize and tweak open source designs, or
create brand new designs based on structural
and industrial engineering know-how.
Intuitive, easy-to-use tools allow “things” to be
created, manipulated, and shared.
In essence, 3D printing makes
manufacturing complexity free of charge,
allowing otherwise impossible designs to
be realized. Objects are built one layer at
a time, depositing material as small as 100
nanometers exactly where and when needed.
Mechanical items with moving parts can be
printed in one step—no assembly required.
Interlocking structures mimicking nature’s
design laws are possible with nearly unlimited
geometrical freedom—no tooling, set-ups, or
change-overs. Moreover, objects can be built
just in time when and where they are needed.
The capability unlocks business performance
in a highly sustainable manner by reducing
inventory, freight, and waste. 3D printing’s
value is not limited to complex objects.
Exponentials
131

On-site creation of investment castings or
construction molds can supplement traditional
manufacturing techniques.
3D printing is not just for prototypes
and mock-ups. Many sectors already use the
technology for finished parts and products.
The aerospace industry, for example, has
led the charge on additive manufacturing.
Jet engine parts such as manifolds require
more than 20 pieces that are individually
manufactured, installed, welded, grinded, and
tested into a finished product. The 3D printed
alternative is easier to build and service and
also reduces overall system weight. Medical
devices use 3D printing to customize and
personalize everything from dental crowns to
hearing aids to prosthetics.
The potential doesn’t end there. More
fantastical use cases are starting to become
a reality, such as mass customization of
consumer goods, including personalized
products ranging from commodities to toys to
fashion, with “print at home” purchase options.
Even food printers are entering the market,
starting with chocolates and other sugar and
starch staples, but moving toward meats and
other proteins. Organs, nerves, and bones
could be fully printed from human tissue,
transforming health care from clinical practice
to part replacement—and even life extension.
Leading thinkers are exploring self-organizing
matter and materials with seemingly magical
properties. One example is already here: a
plane built of composites with the ability to
morph and change shape, ending the need for
traditional flaps and their associated hydraulic
systems and controls.
The enterprise implications are many—and
potentially profound. First, organizations
should take an honest look at their supply
chain and market offerings—and identify
where the technology could enhance or
replace these offerings. As we discussed in
the Digital engagement chapter, intellectual
property and rights issues will emerge, along
with new paths to monetize and disrupt.
Finally, business leaders should embrace the
democratized creativity the technology is
unleashing. Companies can use 3D printing
to drive faster product innovation cycles,
especially where it can push the boundaries
of possibilities based on materials science and
manufacturing techniques.
Inspired by lectures given by Avi Reichental,
co-chair for nanotechnology and digital
fabrication, Singularity University
Avi Reichental currently serves as faculty co-
chair of the additive manufacturing program
at Singularity University. He has been the
president and chief executive officer of 3D
Systems since September 2003.
Advanced computing
Advances in raw computing power and
connectivity are frequently the building blocks
of our annual tech trends report. Core lessons
that have guided us through the Internet
revolution remain true today, and are steering
us toward exponential advances in the future
of computing.
The first lesson is the importance of
early adopters and how they personally
and commercially kick-start industries and
adoption. Early adopters have an insatiable
demand for improvement and for the doubling
of performance. Moore’s Law forecasts how
many transistors per dollar could be put onto a
chip wafer. Engineering curiosity and scientific
prowess have fueled many advances in the
field. Nonetheless, to build growth and feed
customer demand, companies continue to
invest in seismic performance improvements
because they know there is a demand for
products that are twice as good.
The second lesson is an open, hackable
ecosystem with a cost contract that encourages
experimentation through its lack of
incremental accounting for network usage.
From the system kits of the PC revolution to
the open source movement to today’s Arduino
and Raspberry Pi hobbyists, a culture of
innovation and personal discovery is driving
132

advances in open groups instead of proprietary
labs. Lessons and learnings are being shared
that accelerate new discoveries.
The third lesson is that the magical
ingredient of the Internet is not the technology
of packet switching or transport protocols.
The magic is that the network is necessarily
“stupid,” allowing for experimentation and
new ideas to be explored on the edges without
justifying financial viability on day one.
On the computing side, we are at a
fascinating point in history. Rumblings about
the end of Moore’s Law are arguing the wrong
point. True, chip manufacturers are reaching
the theoretical limits of materials science and
the laws of physics that allow an indefinite
doubling of performance based on traditional
architectures and manufacturing techniques.
Even if we could pack in the transistors, the
power requirements and heat profile pose
unrealistic requirements. However, we have
already seen a shift from measuring the
performance of a single computer to multiple
cores/processors on a single chip. We still see
performance doubling at a given price point—
not because the processor is twice as powerful,
but because twice the number of processors
are on a chip for the same price. We’re now
seeing advances in multidimensional chip
architecture where three-dimensional designs
are taking this trend to new extremes. Shifts
to bio and quantum computing raise the
stakes even further through the potential
for exponential expansion of what is
computationally possible. Research in the
adjacent field of microelectromechnical
systems (MEMS) and nanotech is redefining
“hardware” in ways that can transform our
world. However, like our modest forays into
multi-core traditional architectures, operating
systems and software need to be rewritten to
take advantage of advances in infrastructure.
We’re in the early days of this renaissance.
The network side is experiencing similar
exponential advances. Technologies are being
developed that offer potentially limitless
bandwidth at nearly ubiquitous reach.
Scientific and engineering breakthroughs
include ultra-capacity fiber capable of more
than 1 petabit per second11
to heterogeneous
networks of small cells (micro-, pico-, and
femtocells12
) to terahertz radiation13
to
balloon-powered broadband in rural and
remote areas.14
Civic implications are profound, including
the ability to provide education, employment,
and life-changing utilities to the nearly five
billion people without Internet access today.
Commercially, the combination of computing
and network advances enable investments in
the Internet of Things and synthetic biology,
fields that also have the ability to transform
our world. Organizations should stay aware
of these rapidly changing worlds and find
ways to participate, harness, and advance
early adoption and innovation at the edge.
These lessons will likely hold true through this
exponential revolution—and beyond.
Inspired by lectures given by Brad
Templeton, networks and computing chair,
Brad Templeton is a developer of and
commentator on self-driving cars, software
architect, board member of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Internet entrepreneur,
futurist lecturer, and writer and observer of
cyberspace issues. He is noted as a speaker
and writer covering copyright law, political
and social issues related to computing and
networks, and the emerging technology of
automated transportation.
Exponentials
133

Authors
Bill Briggs, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Bill Briggs is the chief technology officer of Deloitte Consulting LLP
and global lead of Deloitte Digital. He helps clients address their
technology challenges—and anticipate the impact that new and
emerging technologies may have on their business in the future.
134

Endnotes
1. Economist, “The last Kodak moment?,” January 14, 2012, http://www.
economist.com/node/21542796, accessed January 24, 2014.
authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple, Inc.
3. Babson College, “Welcome from the dean,” http://www.babson.edu/program/
graduate/Pages/dean-message.aspx, accessed January 24, 2014.
4. Doug Gross, “Google boss: Entire world will be online by 2020,” CNN, April 15, 2013, http://
www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/tech/web/eric-schmidt-internet/, accessed January 20, 2014.
5. Andrew Myers, “Stanford’s John McCarthy, seminal figure of artificial intelligence,
dies at 84,” Stanford News, October 25, 2011, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/
october/john-mccarthy-obit-102511.html, accessed January 24, 2014.
6. Lucas Mearian, “World’s data will grow by 50X in next decade, IDC study predicts,”
Computerworld, June 28, 2011, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217988/World_s_
data_will_grow_by_50X_in_next_decade_IDC_study_predicts, accessed January 24, 2014.
7. J. Craig Venter Institute, Venter Institute scientists create first synthetic bacterial
genome, January 24, 2008, http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/
synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/, accessed January 24, 2014.
8. Singularity Hub, “An inside look into the Amazon.com warehouses (video),”
April 28, 2011, http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/28/an-inside-look-into-
the-amazon-com-warehouses-video/, accessed January 24, 2014.
9. Aviva Hope Rutkin, “Report suggests nearly half of US jobs are vulnerable to computerization,” MIT
Technology Review, September 12, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-
suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/, accessed January 24, 2014.
10. Marc Goodman, “What business can learn from organized crime,” Harvard
Business Review, November 2011, http://hbr.org/2011/11/what-business-can-
learn-from-organized-crime/ar/1, accessed January 24, 2014.
11. Phys.org, “One petabit per second fiber transmission over 50 km,” http://phys.org/
news/2012-09-petabit-fiber-transmission-km.html, accessed January 27, 2014.
12. Scott Reeves, “Pros and cons of using femtocells,” TechRepublic, November 11, 2013, http://www.
techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/pros-and-cons-of-using-femtocells/#., accessed January 24, 2014.
13. Tim Wogan, “New tuner could bring terahertz to the masses,” PhysicsWorld, June
12, 2012, http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/jun/12/new-tuner-
could-bring-terahertz-to-the-masses, accessed January 24, 2014.
14. Google, Inc., “What is Project Loon?,” http://www.google.com/loon/, accessed January 24, 2014.
Exponentials
135

Authors
Bill Briggs
Chief technology officer
Disruptors
Tom Galizia, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
tgalizia@deloitte.com
Chris Garibaldi, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
cgaribaldi@deloitte.com
Cognitive analytics
Rajeev Ronanki, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
rronanki@deloitte.com
David Steier, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
dsteier@deloitte.com
Marcus Shingles, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
mshingles@deloitte.com
Jonathan Trichel, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
jtrichel@deloitte.com
Digital engagement
Christine Cutten, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
ccutten@deloitte.com
Barbara Venneman, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
bvenneman@deloitte.com
Wearables
Shehryar Khan, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
khans@deloitte.com
Evangeline Marzec, specialist master, Deloitte Consulting LLP
emarzec@deloitte.com
Enablers
Scott Buchholz, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
sbuchholz@deloitte.com
David Sisk, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
dasisk@deloitte.com
Social activation
Dave Hanley, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
dhanley@deloitte.com
Alicia Hatch, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
ahatch@deloitte.com
Cloud orchestration
Andy Main, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
amain@deloitte.com
John Peto, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
jpeto@deloitte.com
Mike Brown, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
mikbrown@deloitte.com
Doug Krauss, specialist leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP
dkrauss@deloitte.com
Real-time DevOps
Ayan Chatterjee, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
aychatterjee@deloitte.com
Alejandro Danylyszyn, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
adanylyszyn@deloitte.com
Exponentials
Bill Briggs, Chief technology officer
Appendix
137

Aaron Sotelo, Abdi Goodzari, Adarsh Gosu, Amy Bergstrom, Andrew Luedke, Angel Vaccaro,
Ann Perrin, Antonio Caroprese, Chad Clay, Chrissy Weaver, Dan LaCross, Dan McManus,
Daniel Ledger, Daryl Jackson, Dennis Startsev, Derik Quinn, Ed Panzarella, Elizabeth Rielly,
George Collins, Gina Marchlowska, Irfan Saif, Jarrod Phipps, Jeff Powrie, John Daab, John Keith,
John Stefanchik, John Sprouse, Jon Wiesner, Jostin Darlington, Junko Kaji, Kavin Shelat, Keith
Zalaznik, Kevin Weier, Kumar Chebrolu, Lisa Iliff, Maria Gutierrez, Martin Hougaard, Matt
Lennert, Missy Hyatt, Navin Advani, Nicole Leung, Oliver Page, Paul Krein, Paul Roma, Paul Toler,
Prabhu Kapaleeswaran, Rajeswari Chandrasekaran, Ram Venkateswaran, Rithu Thomas, Robert
Kasegrande, Sandy Ono, Steven Bailey, Steven Shepley, Tara Newton, Travis Budisalovich, Trey
McAdams, Troy Bishop, Vladimir Baranek, Yu Zhu
Leads: Tom Carroll, Chris Chang, Tore Dyvik, Justin Franks, Thomas Gleason, Rui He, Thomas
Henry, Karthik Kumar, Nicole Leung, Simy Matharu, Abhishek Mishra, Jose Munoz, Paridhi
Nadarajan, Akshai Prakash, Fatema Samiwala, Jeremy Young
Team Members: Jacob Artz, Anwar Ayub, Rachel Belzer, Simeon Bochev, Kevin Bojarski, Mark
Brindisi, Alex Carlon, Felix Cheng, Judy Chiu, Eugene Chou, Ian Clasbey, Kyle Collins, Kevin
Craig, Brian Cusick, Philip Davis, Michael Davis, Jefferson DeLisio, Zach Epstein, Inez Foong,
Marjorie Galban, Leksi Gawor, Rachana Gogate, Calvin Hawkes, Taylor Hedberg, Dan Heinitsh,
Dan Henebery, Seimi Huang, Sam Jamison, Simon Jo, Solomon Kassa, Rebecca Kim, Ryo Kondo,
Adrian Kosciak, Ashish Kumar, Varun Kumar, Corey Lian, Alyssa Long, Pulkit Maheshwari, Ryan
Malone, Tyler Martin, David Melnick, Akhil Modi, Alice Ndikumana, Kashaka Nedd, Brittany
Neisewander, Ryan Pallathra, Aaron Patton, Lee Reed, Talal Rojas, Tammy Ross, Jaclyn Saito, Hugh
Shepherd, Will Shepherdson, Andrea Shome, Kylene Smart, Sam Soneja, Gayathri Sreekanth, Xenia
Strunnikova, Lindsey Tsuya, Peter Van, Jordan Weyenberg, Jenny Zheng
Contributors
Research
138

Mariahna Moore—for being the heart, soul, and “buck” of this year’s report—where every detail
started and stopped, big or small. Your tireless leadership, spirit, and drive are truly inspirational
and a singular reason we hit every ambition without compromising seemingly impossible deadlines.
Cyndi Switzer, Stuart Fano, Jill Gramolini, Kelly Ganis, and Heidi Boyer—the veteran dream
team that makes Technology Trends a reality. Your passion, creativity, and vision continue to take
the report to new heights. And your dedication, energy, and commitment never cease to amaze.
Dana Kublin, Mark Stern, and Elizabeth Rocheleau—for the tremendous impact made in your
first year Tech Trending—from the phenomenal infographics to coordinating our volunteer army to
jumping into the content fray.
Finally, a special thanks to Mark White, the founder of our Technology Trends report series and an
invaluable contributor, mentor, and friend. Thanks for all of your continued support as we build on
your legacy.
Special thanks
Appendix
139

Recent Deloitte
thought leadership
The Deloitte CIO Survey 2013
2014 Technology Media &
Telecommunications Predictions
From Exponential Technologies to
Exponential Innovation
Institutional Innovation: Creating smarter
organizations to scale learning
From exponential technologies
to exponential innovation
Report 2 of the 2013 Shift Index series
From the Deloitte
Center for the Edge
Institutional innovation
Creating smarter organizations
to scale learning
A report by the Deloitte Center for the Edge
140

Stay connected with technology trends:
Subscribe to receive technology-related communications
Subscribe to the Dbriefs webcast series for technology executives
Other trends reports:
Analytics Trends 2014
Global Human Capital Trends 2014 (Coming in February)
Business Trends 2014: Navigating the next wave of globalization (Coming in March)
Appendix
141

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