Predicting user demand Dell’s chief innovation officer says

Recently, Dell held the 2012 High-Level Customer Summit and Dell Channel Partner Conference in Lijiang. At these two conferences, Mr. James Stikeleather, chief innovation officer of Dell's Service Department, analyzed and predicted his own innovation work and his observation of future IT trends. He said, "A lot of people may still be confused about the development of the next two or three years, but our job is to look at the future from five to ten years later."

James Stikeleather introduced in his speech that his main position is to host and lead Dell's think-tank to speculate and anticipate future IT requirements, and the challenges that IT systems may encounter. So Dell’s think tank will have a group of experts to summarize and speculate the signs and application scenarios that are emerging in the market, analyze and expand these, and then analyze the future market demand and related technology direction, and evaluate the embedded New technologies, business models and process directions.

In his speech, he first introduced the content of Capitalization 2.0, including return on investment, return on assets, and the company’s IT assets assessment and value perspective. On the other hand, it is Economics 2.0, which involves the macro work of his work. He will analyze the macro content of the work on the details and the impact on people themselves. The third area is Management 2.0, which he believes will subvert our previous understanding of management and bring more achievements to the company from the perspective of humanity and management.

Next, James talked about Enterprise 2.0 and IT 2.0. It talked about the enterprise's efforts and direction in process optimization and business intelligence. It also included changes in cloud computing, big data, and more intelligence and cost.

These research processes are divided into internal analysis and future prediction. The forecasting directions include some neutral research findings, some cutting-edge science and technology films, research directions, some analysts' remarks, and ideas on social networks. They will interact with these content interactively and extract ideas. From an internal point of view, James said that he is always paying attention to all kinds of signals, including some feedback from the customer and new demand directions from the service department.

"Maybe many people are still confused about the development of the next two or three years," James said. "But our job is to look at the future from five to ten years."

With the development of social media and the advancement of economic models, James believes that these comprehensive changes and social changes will greatly influence the development of IT. For example, he said that this requires that you can integrate systems across time, regions, and groups of people, and flexibly provide services and IT wherever they are needed. He is now focusing on infrastructure, migration and other issues, and he believes that future IT systems will focus on collaboration and other aspects.

When asked by a ZDNet reporter about IT innovations and developments in localization, Mr. James said that different geographical areas and different IT foundations will have very different application scenarios and development.

Since the difference in the current state of IT in various regions does exist, it is just like the water and air in the time of the industrial revolution in James's team. It is a fact that can be studied and analyzed. But the industrial revolution of using steam as a steam engine is the way to change the world – what he needs to do is to anticipate this. He gave an example, which is similar to everyone's prediction of the development of smart phones, and may be different in many small places, not the same APP, different settings and applications. However, the general trend is predictable, and it can be ascertained by doing research on large groups.