On the one hand, it’s all been gratifying. We have been saying for many years that it was inevitable that employees would increasingly own and manage their personal technologies, and that corporate control over employee IT would recede. While many have been sceptical, during 2012 this view has become the conventional wisdom, with one giant firm after another launching various Bring Your Own (BYO) programmes. Industry conferences and the associated punditry have quickly followed suit.

What does it mean for a business to be outside-in – to really be driven by marketplace signals, needs and dynamics? It’s a question we have been thinking about a lot recently, as digital technology creates new ways to listen to the market and rapidly respond to change.

In April, it will be two years since Wikileaks came to prominence by releasing a video of a controversial US helicopter attack in Baghdad. Over the remainder of 2010, Wikileaks published several hundred thousand pages of additional US government material, much of it classified as confidential.

Real-time customer information and the ability to listen to what the online world is saying are becoming critical business requirements, as information technology moves to the very front of the firm. In response, companies are being asked to master a whole new set of previously arcane IT skills such as data analytics, search engine optimization, social media conversations and location awareness.