According to Valacich and Schneider (2018), the emergence of the digital world and changes in technology enable new ways of working and socializing. Over the last decade, five IT Megatrends arose which shape the digital future and interrelate with changes in organizations and society. The five IT megatrends are: Mobile, Social Media, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data.
The first IT Megatrend is related to mobile devices. In fact, many people believe that we already live in a post-PC era. In the developing world, we can see that mobile devices often leapfrog traditional PC’s. This has several implications; for instance, consumerization of IT is a major sub-trend, and approaches like Bring-Your-Own-Device to work is a major concern for many organizations. Likewise, there are many security-related issues (Valacich and Schneider 2018).
The second IT Megatrend is Social Media. In the second quarter of 2022, Facebook had 2,93 billion users (Statista, 2022) who share status updates and pictures with friends and family. Many companies harness the power of the crowd by using social media to include people in the process of innovation and other activities. Besides, many organizations use social media to encourage employee collaboration through enterprise social networks etc (Valacich and Schneider 2018).
The third IT Megatrend is the Internet of Things, which refers to a wide range of physical objects that automatically can share data via the internet. The industrial IoT enables the convergence of operations technology and IT leading to mass-produced customized products (Valacich and Schneider 2018).
The fourth IT Megatrend is Cloud Computing. Web technologies facilitate using the internet as a platform for applications and data. While applications used to be kept on individual computers, they increasingly move to being used in the cloud, e.g., the Google cloud with Docs, spreadsheets, calendar, Gmail and so on. Overall, cloud computing enables advanced analytics of massive amounts of Big Data (Valacich and Schneider 2018).
The fifth IT Megatrend is Big Data. The Industrial Development Corporation estimated that in 2013, 4,4 zettabytes of data were generated and consumed. This is equal to 4,4 trillion gigabytes, or similar to 70 billion 64GB Iphones. They forecasted a growth to 180 zettabytes by 2025. This increasing amount of data enhances the ability to detect valuable relationships and further deep insights that can contribute to the success of businesses (Valacich and Schneider 2018).
Overall, these five IT Megatrends have significant impact on society and organizations. While they come along with many benefits, they also create issues for business and need to be manages carefully.
References:
Statista. (2022). Statista . Von https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37545/umfrage/anzahl-der-aktiven-nutzer-von-facebook/#:~:text=Die%20Anzahl%20der%20monatlich%20aktiven,Netzwerk%20zu%20dem%20Unternehmen%20Meta. abgerufen
Valacich, J., & Schneider, C. (2018). Information Systems Today, Managing in thee Digital World. Pearson.
Growing up before these megatrends were as big (or even existed) as now makes is super interesting to follow. Which one do you think is the least developed as of now?