Success will depend on their ability to design this change through innovation and technology.
Sustained and sustainable growth
Following 2009, a year when the crisis affected all economies worldwide, we are now starting to see signs of recovery. However, there is still some uncertainty regarding the strength and evenness of this recovery. There is no doubt that this crisis has forced companies to reconsider their way of working and rethink their growth strategies. At a time of sharp contraction in lending, many companies have proved to be vulnerable to changes in the economy, and the need to strengthen balance sheets and be more rigorous in their decision-making is patent.
We are in an interconnected and interactive world in which millions of people aspire to greater levels of consumption and well-being, and demand secure and healthy environments. There is an increasing awareness of the need to boost efficiency in energy and the use of resources. This opens up huge opportunities but at the same time it raises standards. Business models must therefore be able to tackle the restrictions imposed by the short-term scenario and start to take into account the medium- and long-term implications of decisions concerning their organisation and its related interest groups.
To survive and prosper in this new environment, organisations must become more flexible when it comes to developing the new capabilities called for in this ever-changing context, they must tap the opportunities offered by an interconnected network of partners and suppliers and seek new ways of working that more efficiently combine internal and external talent. To achieve this, they need the backing of solutions and services that create new competitive advantages with a global vision of their economic, social and environmental impact. Success will depend on their ability to design this change through innovation and technology.
Demand driven by intelligent infrastructure
The role of technology is changing. As well as the capacity to mechanise processes and help decision-making, there is now the opportunity to tap into the potential offered by ICTs to radically enhance the usefulness of infrastructure by rendering it intelligent. Intelligent, digitalised, sensorised and interconnected infrastructure can be reconfigured in response to changes in the environment with no need for human input, and can serve as the basis from which to radically transform business models. Intelligent infrastructure creates increasingly global value chains in which capital and work are deployed in the best locations to optimise economic performance. Accordingly, we think the demand for solutions will be driven by organisations’ need to strengthen their competitive advantages by digitalising their entire infrastructure and defining new working models based on the new potentialities offered by intelligent infrastructure.
Growth in services
The outsourcing of services or business processes is not only a key tool to allow companies to cut costs, but it also gives them the capacity to access technological innovations that enable them to seek competitive advantages, to distinguish themselves from competitors and to boost their competitiveness.
In this connection, organisations no longer merely seek technology providers for isolated projects. They now need a long-term commitment from ICT companies, forging closer ties with them, to the point of making them global technology partners. Against this backdrop, joint innovation and stable relationships for maintaining applications and outsourcing services or entire business processes are efficient tools for cutting costs and, at the same time, increasing their capacity to access technological innovations.
