Our economic system increasingly depends on “digital value creation”: IT and telecommunications have become essential in today’s economy and world of work. They stimulate innovation, allow costs to be reduced and provide the basis for better collaboration. The results of the LIFE 2 Study “Working Connected in Business and Society” pinpoint current and future trends.
- Almost two-thirds of the executives (64%) believe that ICT plays a key economic role as an enabler of new business models. In Germany, ICT executives in some industries expect ICT-generated growth impulses of up to 11 percent and cost-reduction potential of up to 17 percent in the next 5 years.
- 79 percent of executives believe that ICT already has very important or important strategic relevance for their enterprise. Significant influence on the enterprise’s ability to compete: Two-thirds of ICT executives (67%) believe that ICT will have a significant influence on their enterprise’s future competitiveness through the lever “Innovation”; in the United States 76 percent believe this.
- Flexibility, mobility and collaboration are for many ICT executives the key trends in the coming years. IT security is a basic precondition: For more than half of ICT executives (54%) it one of the top 3 trends. Nearly one-third (29%) consider green IT one of the most important issues.
- 81 percent of the ICT executives surveyed believe that cloud computing will establish itself on the market in the next few years. More than half (51%) expect cloud computing to become the dominant method of sourcing ICT services. 77 percent of the IT executives in whose companies cloud computing is used expect investment in this area to rise.
- The significance of virtual collaboration will continue to rise: Six in ten ICT executives believe that the use of virtual collaboration will substantially reduce development costs in their company (62%) and significantly reduce their time-to-market (60%).
- Two-thirds of ICT executives (67%) believe that the importance of decentralized working in their enterprise will rise (strongly) in the next 5 years. Consumers also want more mobile access. Security strategies need to be increasingly extended to mobile devices: 66 percent of ICT executives consider role-based access very interesting or interesting.
- ICT executives expect new ICT solutions to bring great change in all the industries and sectors surveyed, and particularly in public safety (e.g. by networking public authorities), education (eLearning), automotive, traffic and transport (e.g. traffic control systems) and energy (smart metering, green IT).
- In the transport industry, ICT executives believe that ICT will make a great contribution to solving key challenges in “safety” and “avoiding overload.” German ICT executives (automotive) believe that Web-based in-vehicle entertainment systems will become standard in future.
- Three in ten ICT executives (31%) in the health sector believe that the biggest advantage of more ICT in health care will be better quality of treatment. Three-quarters of consumers (77%) believe that an electronic health card will bring significant benefits for patients.
- 70 percent of ICT executives expect green IT to play a (very) important role for their enterprise in 5 years. Although the majority of ICT executives (57%) consider the cost-saving potential of green IT most important, only 24 percent have prepared a business case study for their company. Consumers are very interested in smart metering: 68 percent believe that smart metering will play an important role in their home in 5 years.
