The past year brought big changes to the core software applications and tools that companies use every day, and some of those shifts promise to have a particularly enduring impact. Here are five ways the past year changed enterprise software for good.

1. As at home, so at work

Compare today’s enterprise software tools with those from just a year or two ago, and you can’t help but notice one striking difference: the user experience. Today’s software increasingly incorporates ideas and features from the consumer world — in particular, from smartphones and mobile computing. Interfaces are dramatically simpler, social features are ubiquitous, interactions mimic those we’re all familiar with from our personal lives, and absolutely everything is mobile-enabled. This isn’t your father’s enterprise software anymore, and that’s a very good thing.

2. Analytics for all

Another ubiquitous component that wasn’t there before is analytics. If they haven’t already, you can be sure they’re coming soon to work software near you. Analytics capabilities have been democratized. Business users are being freed from submitting an IT request or begging for time with a highly trained analyst; instead, many analytics tools are at their fingertips, giving the power to slice, dice and probe data to their heart’s content. Is that a good thing? In many ways, absolutely — though it’s not without potential perils.
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LONDON: Your fears are not completely unfounded: mobile phones can actually cause cancer, says a study.

A metabolic imbalance caused by radiation from your wireless devices could be the link to a number of health risks, such as various neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, the study suggested.

This imbalance, also known as oxidative stress, is defined as “an imbalance between the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and antioxidant defence” by the authors.

The hazardous effects of radiation from wireless devices could be realised through the “classical mechanisms” of oxidative impairments in living cells, the researchers said.
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