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John Motley

2011 will be a time to adapt to the new normal. Companies will hesitate to add capital and staff infrastructure and will get by with what they have. In 2010, we saw a tremendous focus on cost management and increased efficiency, and everyone will try to do more with fewer resources than they had before the Great Recession.

The second part of the new normal is increased focus on risk management. With the specter of a potential double dip in the economy, risk assessment to economic and supply chain uncertainty has become part of global corporate culture.

In the supply chain technology sector, this means focusing on collaborative frameworks to engage multiple partners in the supply chain.

This translates into an exciting time because many customers are undertaking significant multi-enterprise business transformation projects. Customers are “mashing” together e-commerce, Web forms, XML and the Internet to enable tremendous boosts in efficiency and collaborative management of products, transportation and risks.

We also see customers embracing network-based business processes outside their organizations. This is a great fit for technology in the international marketplace. Many technology customers that overused the “cloud computing” metaphor are finding a more educated consumer looking for actual capability over vision.

As one client put it, “We’re done with cloudy vision. We need real productivity improvements, now.”