2013 has seen many organisations adopt cloud technologies to benefit from a more agile and affordable way of working. Making his predictions for 2014, Fred Laluyaux, CEO of business modeling and planning platform Anaplan expects more widespread acceptance of cloud as a business enabler, as organisations continue to debunk the myths around cloud and recognise real competitive advantage.
Fred Laluyaux’s 2014 predictions:
• More collaboration, less dependency
Business users want the ability to make plans, analyse vast volumes of data and perform financial consolidation immediately, without depending on input from IT teams or business analysts. Next year, we’ll see business silos broken down as disparate teams can work with real-time data on the same platform to make more informed decisions and forecasts.
• Blurred lines between finance and operations planning
By moving modelling and planning to the cloud, businesses can enable true collaboration that is not just top down or bottom up. In 2014, we’ll therefore see more and more finance and operations teams building models that answer ‘what if?’ scenarios for immediate results.
Finance and operations departments will have the ability to ask the question, ‘what if I re-organise my business in this way?’ and see how the results would impact the entire organisation.
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• Crowdsourcing to become crucial
As well as collaboration between departments within an organisation, we also expect to see more collaboration across different businesses in the form of crowdsourcing. By sharing technologies, models and best practice across various sectors and non-competitive companies, we’ll be able to dramatically improve how content is created, enriched and delivered.
While many may be sceptical that businesses would want to share best practice models with competitors, we’re already seeing this happen as industries look to improve processes and exchange information.
• Cloud first approach to computing
The main objections to cloud adoption were traditionally concerns around the security of data and the perceived issues of data integration. During 2013, we hit a real tipping point around the world and across almost all sectors.
IT teams started better understanding the value of cloud and began encouraging users to look to the cloud first in order to solve business issues. Next year, I predict that this trend will continue and all verticals, including previously slow adopting government and banking organisations, will be looking to the cloud to tackle IT and businesses challenges.
