Cynthia Harvey on January 11, 2022
As enterprises continue to respond to the changing conditions created by the pandemic, IT will need to embrace new approaches and new technologies.
As we head into the second year of the global pandemic, everyone understands that our world will never go back to exactly what it was before.
In their Predictions 2022 report, industry analysts at Forrester write, “Disruption has ensued since the dawn of the digital era — but it exploded in intensity and breadth starting in 2020.”
For years, experts had advised business and IT leaders to embrace agility. Now, recent events have provided an all-too-real object lesson of why speed and flexibility are so important.
At this time of year, all the major analyst firms come out with their list of top trends and key technologies to watch in the coming twelve months. Often these lists are driven by technological advancements. But this year, the most important trends that will affect enterprise IT teams are tied very directly to current events.
Business leaders are looking for ways to respond to changing conditions. And given the current state of the world, many will be relying heavily on IT to enable new ways of working, serving customers, and getting business done — all while keeping costs under control, of course.
“CEOs know they must accelerate the adoption of digital business and are seeking more direct digital routes to connect with their customers,” says David Groombridge, a VP analyst at Gartner. “But with an eye on future economic risks, they also want to be efficient and protect margins and cash flow.”
McKinsey echoes that sentiment. The firm says, “During the pandemic, technology further lowered barriers to digital disruption, paving the way for more rapid, technology-driven change. Survey respondents in every sector say their companies face significant vulnerabilities to profit structures, the ability to bundle products, and operations.”
So, what are the trends that industry analysts believe will affect enterprise IT teams, and the businesses they serve, in 2022? The following slideshow highlight 10 trends that will be particularly influential — in IT and far beyond.
1. All-Digital
One of the big effects of the pandemic is that it moved so much of people’s lives online. And industry analysts don’t believe that this trend is changing anytime soon.
Forrester predicts that in the coming year, “Around 80% of consumers will see the world as all-digital, with no divide.” It adds, “In April 2020, 49% of UK and 63% of US online adults said they had done a new online activity, such as attending a religious service or exercise class. Thirty-five percent of UK and 44% of US online adults upgraded their in-home technology. Even consumers who were once considered digital holdouts anticipate continuing the online behaviors they picked up in the pandemic.”
While this move to an all-digital world holds a lot of opportunities for businesses, it also comes with a real cost — digital fatigue. IDC says that in the next two years, companies will need to find ways to compensate. It forecasts, “By 2023, to counter digital fatigue, 60% of leading organizations will look to differentiate by delivering trusted and memorable engagements that recreate physical experiences.”
2. Remote-First
This all-digital experience is particularly apparent in the workplace, with many knowledge workers continuing to work from home, now for a second year (and counting). This dramatic change in how work gets done has presented enormous challenges for IT professionals, many of whom are still adjusting to the new normal.
These adjustments are likely to continue as organizations accept the reality that remote work is here to stay. IDC says, “By 2023, digital transformation and business volatility will drive 70% of G2000 organizations to deploy remote or hybrid-first work models, redefining work processes and engaging diverse talent pools.” In a separate paper it adds, “By 2023, 40% of G2000 companies develop all new processes as remote operations first, compared with the very limited number of remote operations processes in 2020.”
But this translation probably won’t be seamless. Forrester claims, “One-third of first attempts at anywhere work simply won’t work.”
3. Cloud-Native
To facilitate this transition to an all-digital, remote first world, enterprises are speeding up their embrace of cloud-native technologies like containers and serverless infrastructure.
Gartner notes that cloud-native has a lot of benefits, such as allowing “you to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile — enabling you to respond to rapid digital change.” It continues, “Cloud-native platforms improve on the traditional lift-and-shift approach to cloud, which fails to take advantage of the benefits of cloud and adds complexity to maintenance.”
The embrace of cloud-native tech is already well underway. According to Forrester, “Cloud-native adoption rose between 2020 and 2021: Developers reported increased usage of containers (33% to 42%) and serverless (26% to 32%) at their organization. In 2022, cloud-native adoption will rise to half of enterprise organizations.”
In summary, the firm says, “Rather than being supplementary or a nice-to-have, cloud-native will become the core of the cloud strategy in 2022 and moving forward.”
4. Hyperautomation
All-digital and remote-first creates a lot of barriers to collaboration, which can slow businesses down and impede their agility. To overcome this tendency, a growing number of enterprises are embracing hyperautomation.
Many IT teams were already embracing automation as part of their embrace of DevOps methodologies before the pandemic. Hyperautomation takes this to the next level, automating not only IT processes, but also business processes. It incorporates AI and eliminates manual processes wherever possible.
The benefits of hyperautomation include “scalability, remote operation and business model disruption,” Gartner says.
And McKinsey hypothesizes that these drivers are so attractive that “50% of today’s work activities could be automated in the next few decades, spurring powerful changes to the future of work, labor costs, and public policy.”
5. Creative AI
AI won’t just be handling automation and orchestration. Many observers see an expanding role for artificial intelligence as these tools gain the ability to do more creative work.
For example, this past year, South Africa became the first country to grant a patent to an AI system. Forrester believes this trend is likely to continue with companies relying more and more on AI for creative work.
Similarly, Gartner includes “generative AI” in its list of top trends for 2022. It says, “Generative AI has the potential to create new forms of creative content, such as video, and accelerate R&D cycles in fields ranging from medicine to product creation.”
6. Decision Intelligence
AI will also continue its involvement in a field where it has already become a standard tool — analytics. For several years, enterprises have been increasing their reliance on AI for the insights that can help them make better business decisions.
Gartner sees these AI-based processes becoming more formalized in the coming year. It predicts the rise of “decision intelligence,” which it defines as “a practical approach to improve organizational decision making. It models each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from, and refine decisions.”
While it uses different terminology, IDC also sees a trend toward greater use of technology for business decision-making. It forecasts, “By 2023, 60% of enterprise intelligence initiatives will be business specific, purpose built for business, shortening the data to decisions time frame by 30%, driving higher agility and resiliency.”
It also says, “By 2023, 70% of connected workers in task-based roles will use intelligence embedded in adaptive digital workspaces from anywhere to engage clients/colleagues and drive enterprise productivity.”
7. Trust Architecture
The pandemic also brought about a sharp increase in cyberattacks. Companies and consumers alike are more concerned than ever about keeping data secure.
To address those concerns, companies are embracing new trust architectures, particularly zero-trust architecture. As McKinsey explains, “Trust architectures provide structures for verifying the trustworthiness of devices as data flows across networks, APIs, and applications.”
IDC expects this greater concern about trust to affect the highest levels of management. “By 2023, most C-suite leaders implement business critical KPIs tied to data availability, recovery and stewardship, as rising levels of cyber-attacks expose the scale of data at risk,” it predicts.
Cybersecurity concerns will also affect relationships with customers. The firm also says, “By 2025, 35% of organizations will replace Net Promoter Score-like metrics with Trust Indices in RFPs to align traditional security and risk solutions with customer success, brand, and reputation.”
8. Composable Applications
The pandemic hammered home the need for agility. And in their quest to speed their ability to respond to changes in the marketplace, many organizations are embracing new approaches to software development.
One common theme, cited by Gartner, is composable applications. In this approach, applications are built from many smaller, independent pieces that can be used in multiple applications. “Composable applications make it easier to use and reuse code, accelerating the time to market for new software solutions and releasing enterprise value,” Gartner explains.
McKinsey sees a similar trend, which it calls “Software 2.0.” It says these changes will also provide organizations with a far easier, more iterative, and intuitive way to customize existing code and automate mundane programming tasks through low-code and no-code approaches.”
9. ESG
The pandemic wasn’t the only big news of the past year. Climate change, racial injustice, and many other social issues have taken turns in the spotlight.
In the past, organizations have often paid lip service to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, but these concerns are now coming to the forefront. Forrester forecasts, “2022 will see less performative virtue signaling within the private sector. Instead, B2C marketers will take bold actions that advance ESG goals.” The firm cites survey data which shows that the number of people in the US who claim they buy from brands that reflect their goals climbed from 40% in 2020 to 48% in 2021, with an expectation that it will be over 50% for this year.
ESG concerns also affect IT. IDC predictions in this area include the following:
- “Sixty percent of G2000 companies will use sustainability KPIs and data as primary operational control parameters by 2026, compared to less than 20% in 2021.”
- “By 2024, the use of data and analytics will have enabled a 3% reduction in global CO2 emissions by the industrial and commercial sectors (a net reduction of over 400M metric tons of CO2).”
- “By 2024, 75% of G2000 digital infrastructure RFPs require vendors to prove progress on ESG/Sustainability initiatives with data, as CIOs rely on infrastructure vendors to help meet ESG goals.”
10. Smart Infrastructure
One last trend that is likely to affect IT in the coming year is the government response to the economic fallout that resulted from the pandemic. All over the globe, nations are stepping up their investments in an effort to stimulate the economy. And one common type of investment is smart infrastructure.
“The US, the EU, and China launched related initiatives backed by trillions of dollars of stimulus,” Forrester notes, “IoT and edge technologies that ride advanced networks like 5G have demonstrated that they can empower smart, connected ports, roads, and trains. It’s a strong match, and in 2022, we expect smart infrastructure investments to gain remarkable growth powered by this government spending windfall in all geographies.”
Collected at: https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/10-trends-that-will-affect-it-in-2022?slide=1