As the pace of business quickens, there is a growing importance of two requirements for business today—the need to make informed decisions and the need for real-time responsiveness. Companies must eliminate information lag and make more timely and effective decisions. The PricewaterhouseCoopers Tech Forecast 2003–05 identifies the key technologies that will go towards making an intelligent real-time enterprise. Here are some major trends to be seen in the given forecast period in some of these technologies and applications:

Business Intelligence
BI has evolved into comprehensive performance monitoring solutions that enable real-time decision-making for all levels of employees within the enterprise. To achieve success with this approach, companies need to identify and set performance measurements for a small number of key performance indicators (KPIs), for example, order fill rate, inventory turnover.

Businesses will be increasingly organized, managed and automated around sets of processes—from production processes to sales and customer management processes, and even supporting processes like accounting and HR. Business intelligence capabilities will be increasingly built into applications that automate these processes, as well as into specialty business intelligence tools and applications.

The use of BI is also likely to shift—from traditional use over aggregated high volumes of historical data, to use on data with varying degrees of latency starting from real-time, and boiling down to even individual transactions.

Enterprise BI tools have gone beyond analyzing the data thrown by transactional systems like ERP, SCM, to incorporating workflow design and other business process improvement functionality. Centralized data warehousing continues to be essential for multidimensional analysis and in-depth reporting.

CRM
CRM is becoming more than an internal system: partnership management tools help extend customer marketing, sales and support through business partners, to extend a company’s customer understanding and service efforts through those other relationships. Unlike first-generation CRM applications that were purely operational, today’s analytical CRM tools provide customer intelligence capabilities. They evaluate customer data for patterns that help enterprises with their marketing campaigns and sales pitches.

Mobile CRM applications are becoming more important for companies with active field service areas, in which technicians and repair people are working outside the office. In the forecast period, the CRM industry will witness significant consolidation—reducing the range of vendor and platform choices.

CRM projects are getting smaller and more focused, and with better partnership between IT and functional managers, they are experiencing higher success rates. Many CRM vendors have begun to offer special applications for vertical industries. The implementations are moving away from complex customization and towards drag-and-drop configuration.

Collaboration
Collaborative features in applica-tions facilitate direct human interaction. These capabilities are embedded in a variety of other enterprise applications, as well as in specialty collaboration applications. Embedded collaboration is used in business processes like collaborative design and engineering, supply chain forecasting and channel partner or supplier collaboration.

Although e-mail remains the most widely used collaborative tool, instant messaging is gaining a broad audience in business settings. New IM suites allow mobile users to find each other online and do SMS. Some new collaboration suites and platforms—that are still in early stages of adoption—combine presence and messaging features with file sharing, calendaring and online meeting functions. Examples are Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange groupware applications and companion products.

Collaboration products have incorporated familiar features to make it possible for project members to share the following in real time: whiteboards, desktop applications and even complex engineering, logistics and CRM tools.

A 2002 IDC survey of 400 companies in Western Europe showed that over 80% experienced an RoI in line with their expectations.

Knowledge Management and Content Management
The first generation of KM tools re-quired a great deal of employee participation to maintain shared knowledge repositories and the employees had little incentive to maintain these bases. But the newer products focus on what can be maintained automatically or with the help of little customization. The new innovations in knowledge management technologies have focused on capturing, extracting and organizing the tacit knowledge that resides in shared repositories like e-mail systems. Vendors have produced automatic tagging tools to help extract information and classify it. These tools analyze text and generate a hierarchy of relevant categories using a combination of predefined semantic, syntactic and document format rules, that users can modify with their own classification schemes.

There are also new expertise location applications, which analyze e-mail and other text flows between individuals in an organization in order to build dynamic expertise profiles of each person. These tools rank concepts in the text according to relevance and frequency and build profiles based on the results of the ranking.

While factors like lack of demonstrable RoI, inability to change organizational culture and failure to integrate KM into everyday work practices many have dampened enthusiasm for enterprise-wide KM projects, the newer emphasis is on smaller, more focused projects that are easier to justify and evaluate. The ECM represents a convergence of existing technologies for Web content management, document and records management, and digital asset management. A single comprehensive system performs internal document management (coordinating creation, modification, use and storage of electronic and paper documents through their lifecycle), updates and controls websites and manages intranets.

New advances in content syndication standards like business process modeling language are being adapted to design complex workflows that span content management among other e-business domains. WebDAV is an important standard that can enable authors to work in a familiar environment before saving work back into a managed repository. The benefits of ECM have been demonstrated and accepted, and tools and methods are increasingly stable. A January 2003 study in the UK by Dimension Data pointed out that approximately 40% of 500 large UK companies plan to invest up to £75,000 in modular content management projects, while 10% said they were considering big-ticket implementations worth up to £2 million.

XBRML
XBRML is an electronic format for sim-plifying the flow of financial statements, performance reports, accounting records and other financial information between software programs. This XML-based technology is slated to significantly change business reporting in coming years. Until recently, there were no standards that would allow financial information to be automatically communicated between different applications. Companies had to manually assemble financial information from different systems in order to prepare financial reports. XBRL defines a consistent format for financial data and will streamline how companies prepare and disseminate their financial data and how analysts, regulators and investors review and interpret it.

Availability of quarterly and yearly financial reports in XBRL format will make it significantly easier for analysts and investors to use and interpret that data. In the longer term, XBRL could increase both the frequency of financial reporting and the extent of the information that is reported to investors.

XML and Web Services
Extensible Markup Language provides a context in which applica-tions can send and receive messages and documents, and which describe the nature of their own content, in machine-readable form.

XML also provides the basis for Web services, which will eventually replace the current model of the Web—people looking at webpages—with automated communication between software programs, allowing information available on the Web to be accessed and processed by applications on behalf of humans. For example, Web services will allow company financial reports in XBRL format to be automatically retrieved by a financial analysis program, eliminating the need for an investor to first locate and download the information. One of the important uses of Web services is expected to be integration between applications based on the two major competing component frameworks (J2EE and .Net).

XML will provide the basis for developing specifications and standards for automating business process within and between businesses. Web services will be used for pairwise integration of applications as part of overall integration between trusted business partners.

Web services will also allow desktop applications to access information from the Internet without first locating and downloading it to their local file system. However, before the use of Web services becomes widespread, the industry must resolve some of the uncertainty caused by the competition between the standards described above.