Technology in 2015 – omnichannel, social business and the end of traditional files?

Customers are now connecting with their brands via a number of different platforms, which means that businesses will need to adopt a similar omnichannel approach for their own internal processes to ensure they are fully aligned with their customers’ expectations.

Social goes useful
We’ve seen social chat tools for the enterprise gaining traction in the US this year – and they are now spreading to the UK as well.

2015 will see the next evolution of these social chat tools, with businesses integrating social business platforms alongside their other internal systems. Solutions like these will not only let employees ‘chat’ across an internal intranet, but will also enable them to work together on projects at the same time online, thereby increasing collaboration and visibility for employees at all levels.

Everything in the cloud
With Google, Microsoft and now even Apple entering the cloud storage business, we won’t see a slow down in cloud-based working in 2015.

Trusting teams' information in the cloud is swiftly becoming a viable and secure option for more and more businesses, with the benefits for those who made the move first already obvious. No hardware, no maintenance, just an SLA and unprecedented flexibility – this trend will continue to grow.

The beginning of the end for files
Phones and phablets already hate files; on mobile devices, files lock information behind unnecessary barriers, present information badly and offer little opportunity to work on the move.

As mobile devices and consumerised IT increasingly become the norm for working life, we will see more and more need for IT to ‘Googlise’ the information in the business, providing open, searchable text, image and video via suitable enterprise software that lets people get on with work - instead of wading through the latest file versions.