These strategic technology trends will help organisations understand how to both respond to and take advantage of disruption. Transforming an organisation can translate into valuable change and opportunities for society at large.
Photo by William Daigneault
Organisational change can be a difficult growing period, especially in the digital era where immediate results are visible to internal management and virally to our external stakeholders. Our negative biases often tend to cloud our judgement and make us perceive any slight mishap on our change journey is nothing but an inevitable downward spiral. Harvard Business Review claims that our obsession with change failure is based on a faulty view that every change effort should be a home run. In fact, in a cited McKinsey survey, 38% stated that change was successfully achieved in organisations, not all home runs but high probability nonetheless. This all comes down to our perceptions of adaptation and how we incorporate them into our organisational structure.
Moving from a bias against change toward having a duty toward adaptation is the law of the digital world.
Challenges and opportunities exist in every technology field. Organisational leaders need to evaluate which particular aspects are the most vital for their innovation strategy. Below is a list of 5 worthy areas from Gartner’s 2019 and Deloitte’s 11th Tech Trends reports that presents extensive business challenges which organisations can tackle to meet our digital demands.
Hyperautomation
An increase in the use of machine learning, automation tools and packaged software will change the nature of work. Knowledge work is beginning to be automised. Organisations need to reinvent the operations of their workforce for the digital era to respond better to market competition. These will come about through improved robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent business process management suits (iBPMS). These remove repetitive, monotonous work and integrate technology for better coordination between machines and humans.
Multiexperience
Interactivity and perception in the digital world will involve virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Experiences will involve greater multitouchpoints and multisensory factors across a greater range of devices and human/computer senses. This will enable immersive experiences through combining the digital and physical. In the next 2 years 70% of organisations will employ some form of these technologies to immerse their clients and workers in areas such as training and simulation, product design and visualisation, and field operations.
Democratization
Democratization of technology will enable a simplified process for learning technical and business expertise. AI solutions streamline stakeholders’ ability to leverage application development, data and analytics, design and knowledge. ‘Citizen data scientists’, ordinary business people who are able to use machine learning and AI to effectively use data without professional analytical skills, will expand as a group because of greater access to and simplification of this technology. This will enable improved data generation, preparation, business intelligence and analytics as mundane data science tasks become automated
Transparency and Traceability
Organisational commitment to digital ethics, privacy and the use of personal data are necessary to improve relations with stakeholders. Attitudes and actions must meet regulations and technology to provide an improved environment built on trust. ML and AI algorithms will need to include ethics, openness, accountability and explainability so that minimal amounts of bias, opacity, or inaccuracy endure in systems. Organisations need to respect data privacy and ownership as these generate trust and, further down the funnel, revenue and profitability.
The Empowered Edge
A greater use of edge computing will enable IoT system development and connectivity. Processing and traffic will need to stay local to improve latency issues and expand its autonomy. By 2022, 75% of data created by business will move to a distributed structure for processing, away from centralised data centres and cloud. This means bringing the processing centres closer to the localised data, rather than vice versa. Intelligence will also move toward the ‘edge’, ranging from simple to complex devices such as appliances and screens to cars and power generators. Digital twins and the 5G are key technologies that will help the advance of these systems through highly reliable connectivity and augmented data aggregation.
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