The past couple of years have proved that digital business is a way to flourish and outperform competitors. CEOs are looking forward to improving the efficiency and growth of their organizations through digital scalability and innovative strategies. In its latest report, Gartner has highlighted 12 trends that will shape the future of digital business and help CEOs achieve growth, digitalization, and efficiency.
4 trending ways to build trust in a digital business
Trust is the basis of technology, and a digital business must be resilient and efficient. The IT foundation must be built to engineer the necessary trust using the following four trends.
1. Data Fabric
Data is an important asset to a digital business. But often it is not utilized effectively. Data fabric integrates data across users and platforms. With inbuilt analytics, data fabric will be able to understand the data used and when required, it makes relevant data available. To implement this, first, we need to identify priority areas and then introduce data fabric solutions. By using metadata analytics, data utilization patterns can be determined. The report says that by 2021, data fabric deployments will improve the efficiency of data utilization by four times.
2. Cybersecurity Mesh
As digital business assets are distributed across the cloud and data centers, traditional security measures will not guarantee protection from breaches. A cybersecurity mesh will provide a composable and interoperable security solution. By building a common base framework to compose and integrate security solutions, we can secure all assets irrespective of location. A cybersecurity mesh will help better identification of risks and quicker response to incidents. By adopting cybersecurity mesh architecture, organizations will be able to reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.
Suggested Reading: 84% of IT leaders optimistic about their cybersecurity readiness: Confluera Cloud Research 2022
3. Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC)
Data can be valuable only if used appropriately for Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, analytics, and insights. With PEC we can create value by sharing the data across the ecosystem via encrypting, splitting, or pre-processing without compromising on privacy. It is expected that by 2025, 60% of the large organizations will adopt one or more PEC techniques in their digital businesses to develop trust.
4. Cloud-native Platforms
Organizations must minimize the lift-and-shift migrations as they do not take any advantage of the benefits of using the cloud. Instead, they should invest in cloud-native platforms. By 2025, more than 95% of the new digital initiatives will be using cloud-native platforms because it reduces the dependencies on infrastructure. This gives digital businesses time to focus on what they do and improve their business. Elasticity and scalability of cloud computing help cloud-native platforms deliver faster time to value.
4 trends that can sculpt the change
Once the trusted foundation is established, the organization must next focus on the technologies to scale its digitalization efforts. A team comprising IT and business staff will be able to find innovative methods to rapidly digitize the business. Below are the latest trending ways by which fusion teams can sculpt the change.
5. Composable Applications as the design mantra
Composable applications comprise packaged-business capabilities (PBCs) which are software-defined business objects. Fusion teams may lack coding skills, be locked into the wrong technologies, and often be tasked with fast-paced delivery. PBCs create reusable modules that can be self-assembled by the fusion teams to swiftly create applications, thereby reducing the time to market.
6. Decision intelligence with decision modeling
Organizations must take better decisions faster and decision intelligence improves these decisions by modeling them through a framework. By integrating data, analytics and AI decision intelligence platforms will be able to support, augment and automate decisions. This will be useful for the fusion teams to manage, evaluate and improve decisions based on learnings and feedback. The report indicates that by 2023, more than one-third of the large organizations will be practicing decision intelligence with decision modeling.
7. Hyperautomation for better corporate performance
Hyperautomation has become the present need due to increased focus on growth, digitalization, and efficiency. It is a business-driven approach to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Based on quality, time to market, business agility or innovation, strategic decisions need to be taken on what processes need to be automated. By 2024, it is expected to drive up the total cost of ownership 40-fold and make adaptive governance a differentiating factor in corporate performance.
8. AI Engineering – the game changer
Reports say that by 2025, 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than enterprises that do not. Organizations must implement AI engineering as a strategic differentiator for creating and maintaining production AI value and establish and refine AI engineering practices that incorporate best practices.
4 trends for accelerating business growth
9. Distributed enterprise architecture
The years of the pandemic not only saw the employees working remotely but also a change in conventional consumer behavior. To win the market, businesses can adopt virtual-first, remote-first architecture. This distributed enterprise model can digitize consumer touchpoints and build out experiences. Organizations that pivot their business model by adopting the distributed enterprise architecture are expected to see 25% faster revenue growth by 2023.
10. Enhancing total experience
Total experience comprises customer experience, user experience, employee experience, and multi-experience. By enhancing the total experience, we create a better experience for consumers and employees. Connecting and enhancing each of these gives a more holistic overall experience for stakeholders. The report by Gartner projects that by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels by transforming their business models based on the total experience.
11. Switching to autonomic systems
The traditional management system cannot scale at the same rate at which the organization grows. are self-managing physical systems that learn from their environments and dynamically modify their algorithms with no software updates. By using autonomic systems, organizations can respond rapidly to changes, enabling the management to scale in complex environments. To start with, organizations can switch to autonomic technologies in cases where early adoption will deliver agility and performance benefits in managing complex systems.
12. Using generative AI
Generative AI is that form of AI that learns a digital representation of artifacts from sample data and uses it to generate new, original, realistic artifacts that retain a likeness to the training data but do not repeat it. Generative AI can drive rapid innovation for enterprises.
Reports estimate that by 2025, generative AI will account for 10% of all data produced.
Source credits: Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022
