8 Technology Trends That Will Dominate This Year

CIOs and IT leaders face tremendous challenges and opportunities. APTA encourages business leaders to rethink digital transformation and investment in the cloud; what the workforce of the future looks like; the role of security, AI, data, and automation; and how to understand and serve customers.

Those who win will be those that clearly understand where the market is headed, can make difficult and necessary decisions, invest in their people, and have a robust industry network.

1. The importance of integration between business teams

CIOs and business leaders need to understand that there are no technology projects, only business projects. During these challenging times, technology investment must be absolutely aligned to the overall business aims. The question must always be, how can we use technology to enhance our core capabilities and improve our bottom line? This requires a holistic approach and the collaboration between people, processes, and technology.

The biggest hindrance on digital initiatives is integration. According to MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report, 89% of IT leaders report data silos as a challenge against digital transformation, and 85% report integration challenges as halting efforts. This highlights how important it is to have strong leadership capable of bridging barriers between development, sales and management. The time of COVID-19 and remote working makes this only more crucial.

2. The continued focus on cloud and digitisation

We have witnessed an increased investment in advanced IT and the cloud as businesses continued to digitise, automate, and outsource technology solutions. As the year progressed and COVID-19 spread around the world, nationwide lockdowns, and work from home (WFH) initiatives had businesses swiftly expediting digital transformation and cloud initiatives to boost resiliency, efficiency, and flexibility of working.

This year will see businesses revisiting migrations to the cloud, considering lessons learnt during the pandemic and ensuring cloud-based systems, application services and SLAs are adequately serving staff and customers. According to IDC analysts, the shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services will continue to accelerate twice as fast as before the pandemic.

3. The rise of the remote workforce and digital workplaces

One of the most drastic and industry-wide changes to take place in the past two years was the transition to a remote and geographically distanced workforce, with increased focus on digital tools to aid this.

WFH initiatives may morph and develop as businesses reopen. However, digital workplaces and hybrid models are here to stay. In fact, according to a survey of 1,200 CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, the percentage of permanent remote workers worldwide will more than double from 16% to 34%. Collaboration technologies such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, 8x8 and more, hardware including PCs, and secure connectivity solutions such as SD-WAN, will enable these workplaces.

4. The necessity of robust security

As cyber threats continue to proliferate and become more targeted and sophisticated, the need for robust security measures becomes even more important. Key threats facing businesses today include web application vulnerabilities through API weaknesses, traditional perimeter security breaches through WFH initiatives, various forms of malware, phishing and more.

One proposed solution to these issues is to adopt a zero-trust security approach. Zero trust locks all privileged resources, granting access only when requested. It assumes they can trust no one and utilises identity and access management protocols and intelligent, autonomous risk assessment. AI-driven pattern and behaviour analysis can be used for further security.

Other security measures growing in popularity include mobile device management (MDM) solutions, network segmentation, and confidential computing where a business encrypts the entire computing process instead of just the data.

5. The proposed benefit of 5G for enterprises

5G continues to be a hot topic for business leaders. Canalys, the market research firm, expects 5G smartphone sales to increase from 28 million in 2020 to over 1.3 billion in 2021. According to Gartner, early 5G adopters are driving competition among communications service providers and fostering mobile network development that will affect growth across various industries.

Businesses investing in mobile technology stand to benefit from greater communication and productivity opportunities. Especially with WFH schemes in place, over time businesses will utilise 5G for more reliable connectivity and bandwidth.

6. The democratisation of AI and data analytics

Artificial intelligence and data analytics will continue to factor into business leader’s decision-making processes and can spell the difference between sustained success and slowed growth.

According to Gartner, 48% of product managers at growth companies, or companies that have seen positive revenue growth, are using analytics to collect and analyse customer perception and sentiment data. On the flip side, poor data quality destroys business value. 2018 Gartner research found that organisations believe poor data quality to be responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses.

As computing power becomes more affordable and the cloud enables access to this power and software and frameworks, more companies will access and utilise advanced data analytics and AI. Whether accessing hardware and software directly or through third-party applications, AI will be further simplified and democratised. As a result, businesses can better understand the priorities and challenges of the organisation, and therefore improve operations.

7. The business-wide power of automation

To support safe, distributed work environments, IDC finds more business leaders are investing in automation across all industries. In fact, according to the analysts, 50% of CIOs will accelerate robotisation, automation, and augmentation by 2024.

IDC isn’t alone in its predictions. According to Salesforce, 81% of IT organisations will automate more tasks to allow team members to focus on innovation over the next 12 months to 18 months; McKinsey notes 57% of organisations say they are at least piloting automation of processes in one or more business units or functions; and MuleSoft research found 30% of IT decision makers say that automation is a key business initiative in digital transformation.

Combining AI and data analytics, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, process mining and other technologies enables businesses to automate not only tasks but entire business processes and workflows. We can use these technologies across the entire business, from management and administration through to manufacturing and finance. As a result, businesses can raise productivity and enable employees to focus on higher value work, and deliver superior customer experiences, ultimately positively impacting the bottom line.

8. The ongoing need to understand the customer

It’s all about the customer. Successful business leaders are utilising technology to both better understand and serve customers.

Utilising key technologies to sense, learn and predict changing customer behaviours enables businesses to enhance customer experiences, therefore encouraging engagement and loyalty. The likes of Customer Data Platforms (CDP) will be utilised to bring fragmented data from multiple sources to organise, tag and make it usable for relevant parties. Businesses can use this data to act on information as opposed to projected assumptions.

For customers themselves, the demand for high quality and consistent engagement is growing. This includes maintaining a clear experience across all channels, including live chat services and mobile device support. In fact, according to MuleSoft, 72% of global consumers would consider changing service providers in response to receiving a disconnected experience.

Customer communication management (CCM), assistive technologies and innovative technologies such as virtual reality will continue to develop the user experience from the back to the front end.

Be digital ready and achieve sustained success

If the pandemic taught business leaders anything, it’s that every business must be a digital business, and they must be able to create value at the speed of need.

We see businesses investing further in their digital initiatives to have robust, secure and scalable infrastructure that enables remote working setups and can feed into improving overall operations and customer experience initiatives.

We see an increase in automation, a greater focus on security, and evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence becoming part of the fabric of the business as models adapt to our ever-changing world. We see CIOs and IT leaders taking a seat at the main table, as organisational and technology strategies become increasingly intertwined.

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