Predictions for 2012

January is the traditional time for trying to predict what the major trends of the next twelve months will be. There are enough people staking their claim to 20/20 foresight for me to know that I shouldn’t join them! However, as I’ve read what other people think, three areas jump out for me as important themes for the sector.

Cloud computing 

This remains the most talked about topic. As I predicted some time ago, we are seeing the various types of cloud offer starting to separate out into distinct segments such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service – possibly the original cloud area), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and so on.

The same concerns remain around bandwidth constraints, data patriation, and security. However, every vendor I speak to says that the high levels of interest from the sector in their services is now transforming into at least partial adoption.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) 

This is inevitably going to be a major trend for the sector. For commercial companies the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets is leading to seemingly irresistible pressures on their IT departments to provide ways to support them in using company systems. With so many volunteers and home based staff in the sector, it is inevitable that this trend, and associated problems, will transfer.

Big data. 

When I first heard this term used by a large IT company, I ignored it as something that I thought was only really relevant to very large commercial organisations (e.g. FMCG companies and retailers analysing vast quantities of sales data). However, over the last few months my view has changed. Even the smallest charities can now access cost effective CRM systems to track their interactions with supporters, and with the increasing amount of data generated by social media sources (Facebook, Twitter etc.), not to mention mobile data such as SMS donations, many of the tools and techniques for analysing and identifying significant trends and correlations within large volumes of data are becoming highly relevant to the sector’s marketeers and fundraisers.