The Digital Company: 2013

Economist Intelligence Unit:

As employees master the use of collaborative technologies to interact with customers and partners, as well as with other colleagues, business information will come to flow more freely over the next five years, both within and outside the firm. Enabling and acting on such flows will be necessary if companies are to transform how they innovate products, services and business processes (through, for example, the integration of customers and third parties into the innovation process).

Realising the benefits of such expanded collaboration in 2013 will require business leaders to come to terms with autonomy: for employees, in how they access information and spend their work time; and for business units, in what technologies they purchase and how they use them. Above all, it will require from executives a great deal of courage--to allow technology to bring customers and other third parties into the company's operations--and trust in their employees to access and use information freely.

This is the main finding of the second paper [640K PDF] in a wide-ranging research programme conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The digital company 2013: Freedom to collaborate, which is sponsored by AT&T, Nokia, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAP, Concep, Return Path and WebEx. The goal of the programme is to determine how technology will impact businesses five years from now. The analysis is based on a survey of more than 600 senior executives from around the globe, as well as in-depth interviews with business leaders and independent technology experts.