Kevin Govender | CIO Programme Leader | Deloitte Africa | mail me |
We presented our 12th annual Tech Trends report identifying nine trends that are likely to transform businesses in the next 18-24 months.
Insights include strategy, risk, and finance implications that will empower technology leaders, business leaders and board members.
The report finds that some organisations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts not only to make their operations nimbler and more efficient, but to respond to dramatic fluctuations in demand and customer expectation.
Key trends
For organisations reckoning with the seismic shifts of 2020, this year’s Tech Trends report discusses the opportunities, strategies, and technologies that will drive confidence in new planning and implementation during the next 18 to 24 months.
The future they find will be distinctly different from the realities of January 2020, yet CIOs are already charting a promising path toward tomorrow, as captured in this year’s report.
Key trends we observed include the future of the workplace, the industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives, upgrades for the critical core, and technology that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
What we’ve seen from the report is that a number of businesses used the situation to translate challenges brought on by for example COVID-19 into opportunities with positive outlooks. This is becoming increasingly necessary as businesses will have to continually adapt to the new way of working.
For a business to lead with confidence in today’s environment will require that they are technologically enabled for the future.
The nine trends explored in the report fall under three main categories:
The Heart of the Enterprise
The Heart of the Enterprise (Strategy, Engineered; Core Revival; and Supply Unchained) focuses on the alignment of organisational and technology strategy. These components of the enterprise are complex, but imperative for success, and must work in concert to support each other.
A Better Experience, Inside and Out
A Better Experience, Inside and Out (Bespoke for Billions: Digital Meets Physical and Rebooting the Digital Workplace) offer a view of two sides of the same evolving coin for customers, employees, and stakeholders: how do you better merge the future of digital and physical experiences to drive more value?
DEI Tech (Tools for Equity) discusses increasingly sophisticated tools to support organisational DEI across the talent lifecycle, which is the spark that powers innovation.
Data: The Art of the Possible
As enterprises move further towards automation and machine-led decisioning, human capacity can be augmented at scale.
MLOps (Industrialised AI; Machine Data Revolution: Feeding the Machine; and Zero Trust: Never Trust, Always Verify) represent three specific opportunities for enterprises to realise more value through industrialisation and automation.
Resilience
The theme of this year’s report is resilience. We have seen countless, inspiring examples of resilience this past year as organisations assessed their circumstances and revised their strategic plans.
“To us, resilience means a stubborn determination to adapt and thrive in the face of change. We have seen CIOs and other executives confidently lead this journey and prove they can bounce back.”
– Scott Buchholz, Emerging Technologies Research Director and Government & Public Services CTO, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Seemingly overnight, COVID-19 disrupted our assumptions and forced us to become more adaptable and responsive than we had previously thought possible.
“Comfortable plans for ‘the future’ were condensed from years into weeks. This growth was uncomfortable at best, but has driven important change, and the trends we are seeing suggest a more hopeful dimension to the turbulent events of the past year.”
– Bill Briggs, Global Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP
