Trendwatch: The Ecosystem Wins

As 2014 drew to a close, Coveo predicted the five trends that will increase worker and customer proficiency in 2015 via advanced, enterprise search-powered apps. This post kicks of a series of five blogs that will each examine one of the trends and explore the forces behind it.

Trend 1: The new ecosystem of record trumps the system of record

Multiple forces—led by the digitalization of the workplace—are accelerating data fragmentation and will require companies in 2015 to recognize and embrace the ecosystem of record: an organization’s entire IT landscape including the apps employees bring to work, and those outside the company’s jurisdiction. All of the rich, legacy, on-premise applications plus existing and new cloud sources containing all of an organization’s work and mapping to organizational know-how comprise the ecosystem of record.

Applications are becoming even more fragmented and specialized, enterprises are again favoring best-of-breed technologies while the monolithic platform model slowly dies. Companies will continue moving to the cloud at a rate faster than predicted. IT executives and business leaders are realizing that the end-all-be-all system of record model has failed. Forward-thinking large platform organizations are looking to search-based apps to bring the “outside in” to their platforms so that they can keep people within their confines.

As a result of embracing the full ecosystem of record, IT organizations will stop trying to move all data into a centralized system of record and rather, enable search-driven unification of data across the entire IT ecosystem, often presented within a system where groups of employees work most – for example within CRM for sales, service and marketing teams.

Success will require utilizing secure, unified indexes which scale at a fraction of the cost that was possible in the past—along with relevance, contextual accuracy, high levels of security and value for the person accomplishing a task, whether an employee, customer or partner.

Success in this effort will transform the workplace with quantum leaps in innovation, fluid and fast response to marketplace changes, and exponentially more engaged employees and customers.

What makes up your company's ecosystem of record?