Tag: digitisation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is no flash-in-the-pan hyped-up tech, it’s the future of connectivity and collaboration in a freshly minted digital world. Digital transformation. Over the past year, this term has rapidly left behind its buzzword status to become a key business enabler in a world defined by pandemic restrictions and new requirements to monitor and manage systems and facilities remotely.  

Most people’s first association with voice recognition technology is Siri, Apple’s now-ubiquitous personal assistant. 10 years on though, the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning initiatives suggest that voice integration has a bright future ahead.

While COVID-19 is certainly not a thing of the past, as a society we appear to be starting to find ways of living with the virus and, for most people at least, taking the necessary precautions to protect ourselves from being infected by it. The same can be said for many businesses.

Financial institutions are spending, on average, 14% of annual operating costs on change management functions in order to drive greater productivity gains, a new study has shown. According to our report, 'Productivity 2021 and beyond: Upskilling the workforce of the future to create a competitive advantage in financial services', more than one in four firms are spending more than 20% of their operating costs on change programmes.

Over the past decade, South Africa has seen a sharp increase in the number of people earning an income outside of formal employment. For some, the need for a self-generated income arose from falling victim to the country’s steadily rising unemployment figures.

One year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, CEOs are voicing record levels of optimism in the global economic recovery, with 76% of global business leaders predicting that economic growth will improve in 2021. Coming off of a global recession (3.5% decline in world GDP) and a GDP contraction of 7% in SA, a record share of CEOs are optimistic about global economic growth this year.

The rollout of 5G in South Africa's urban centres is likely to be one of the most significant technology events of 2021. Where 3G and 4G LTE technology provided increased speeds compared to their predecessors, 5G will establish an entirely new innovation platform upon which many of the technologies and day-to-day conveniences of the future will be built.

Although the rise of COVID-19 presented many challenges to our country in the year 2020, it stimulated the growth of technological innovations that we can build on to the effects on how we do business, how we trade, how we work, how we produce goods, how we learn, how we seek medical services and how we entertain ourselves in 2021.

Although the strategy of digitisation and digital transformation had loosely formed ‘part’ of organisational growth strategies, it was not until the COVID-19 pandemic - where the entire world was forced to stay, and work from home, that ‘digital’ took centre stage.

It’s universally agreed that one of the most significant changes that have been brought about by the COVID-19 is the shift in the way people will live and work in the years to come. Given that technology and digitisation will be central to this shifting dynamic, the role of data scientists in enabling and informing business strategy has never been bigger or more important.