Visual web, Big Data and enterprise technologies

IBA GroupMark HillaryOur last blog mentioned the growth of the visual web. This is an important trend that is changing how content is consumed on the Internet in general, but is also changing the expectation of how managers consumer content within organisations.2013 was the year that images surpassed text as the most popular means of communicating online. Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook have become the most popular ways to communicate and these tools are largely visual.Storing and managing all these images is becoming an enormous big data problem too. There is a growing need to take control of Big Data that is becoming more urgent each day. Ninety per cent of all the data that exists in the world today was created in the past two years, according to analyst firm IDC. The average American office worker generates 5,000mb of data every day just by working on documents, sending emails, or downloading videos. By 2015 the amount of data we are creating now will have doubled – we are exponentially creating more and more data faster and faster.Figures from IDC also suggest that data creation will have grown by 2000% from now to 2020. And regular consumers create 75% of all this new data. This is because 87% of American adults constantly publish their location – often unknowingly – via their mobile phone and 65 billion location tagged payments are made in the US annually.All this automatically published information combined with images and video mean that the way we communicate is changing fast. This affects the way companies hire, the way they market their services, and the way they communicate internally.Enterprise technologies will need to reflect the established public networks if corporate communication – internal and external – is going to succeed in future.