Key enterprise business technology predictions

Disruptive technologies are influencing global businesses, enterprise behavior, and how we operate in our daily lives. With continuously changing consumer needs and preferences, newer versions of technologies are evolving swiftly. In comparison, enterprise technology has been lagging. However, there has been a 180-degree turnaround over the last few years due to the global pandemic and the emergence of new technologies, processes, and business models. Enterprises on the fence about going digital had no option but to evaluate and embrace this transformation to survive. This single event has led to a massive shift across industries, adopting enterprise technologies faster than ever before. Here are some of the more significant enterprise technology trends which we will see now and in the coming years:

Clients will pivot from thinking all digital to thinking hybrid
We heard about everything digital with only a few hybrid models such as hybrid cars, hybrid gears, hybrid delivery (global, multi-location), hybrid systems (human and bot), hybrid cloud, and so on. However, COVID-19, work from home, the emergence of the Metaverse, digital twins, and the recent outages at hyperscalers and native digital providers have taught us that the future will be genuinely hybrid. Clients will therefore be thinking hybrid rather than digital.  

Strategy will pivot from human-centered experience to enhancing engagements in a hybrid world
In the previous era, experience transformation shifted focus from human-centric personas to providing a unified contextual experience across multiple communication channels – social, mobile, web, call center, etc. In the next era, experiences will not just be persona-centric or channel-centric. They will move a notch up and enhance the emerging converged world of multiple identities and avatars – the Metaverse. Key technologies such as mixed reality (MR), digital twins, and artificial intelligence (AI) will drive this change.      

Enterprises will pivot from speed and reliability to agility and composability 
We have moved from a world of high-speed and highly available (HA) operations to autoscaling, self-service, and one-touch reliability and predictability for a standardized, converged, and automated enterprise. In the next era, enterprises will be flexible, agile, and programmable at the core and become composable, where modular, reusable design and orchestration will take center stage.     

Implementations will move from transformation-to-the-cloud to transformation-in-the-cloud
The cloud-first mantra will further strengthen, and organizations will not hesitate to redefine their strategy from long-term, multi-year, high-investment complex modernization programs to high-ROI, short to medium-term project wins with a defined roadmap and future state. This will be done through:

1.  Building greenfield applications in the cloud and then continuing to transform them in the cloud.
2.  Migrating as-is applications to the cloud and then transforming them in the cloud to make them cloud-native.

Automation will become pervasive 
Automation has come a long way from the days of task and workflow automation to robotic process automation (RPA) to AI and ML-driven intelligent process automation (IPA). The next era will be automation everywhere, and many projects/programs and initiatives will start with automation. For example, bots will make bots, while the extent of automation will rapidly increase, and the world will move toward hyperautomation as enterprises develop more confidence in such systems. Taking inspiration from the six levels of car autonomy, enterprises have started looking at different maturity levels in AI-led automation. These levels ensure that while systems learn and become more robust, business operations continue to run without any adverse impact.

Running operations for scalability
Enterprises have witnessed enormous business and tech benefits from embracing DevOps, moving from DevOps to DevSecOps, and further converging with DataOps and evolving into AI and MLOps. This will be enabled by:

1. The next era focusing more on standardizing and scaling DevOps and AI within large enterprises, communities, and industries through a unified, consistent, and repeatable set of tools, use cases, processes, and cultural alignments.
2. Data privacy, where people are trying to create ways of training a machine learning model without exposing the data explicitly to the data scientists via something called differential privacy.

Tech and domain convergence will consolidate
We saw startups driving and redefining industry innovation and tech, creating new leading sub-verticals such as fintech, insuretech, health tech, biotech, retail tech, and so on. The new era will focus on consolidating mushrooming startups in various industries and sub-verticals. Industry stalwarts will not only acquire niche startups, but these niche startups will come together to form e2e industry offerings and address a much broader client base.

High-velocity enterprises will be the winners of the future
So far, winners have come from three categories:

1. Tech and business model innovators
2. High-speed first movers
3. Customer-obsessed organizations

Future winners will be high-velocity enterprises that will not be just high-speed innovators with deep tech or domain skills but those that can build and execute a composable design and orchestrate business-tech convergence from full-stack to hybrid stack with an agile startup culture. 

Technologies enabling high-velocity enterprises
Apart from the adoption of well-known strategies such as cloud-first, the other key enabling technologies of a high-velocity enterprise are:

1. Low-code, no-code platforms
2. Maturity and evolution of machine learning via MLOps
3. Semantic technologies enabled by knowledge graphs giving rise to newer architecture patterns
4. Composable architectures, or the entire ecosystem and library of different solutions that can be easily composed to create a new solution in almost no time

All of these will give much-needed velocity to innovation as well.

New CXO roles will emerge — from chief engagement officer to chief integration officer
As more and more organizations move toward becoming high-velocity enterprises to succeed in the new world of Metaverse, new CXO roles will not only emerge but become critical for organizations to survive and thrive in the ecosystem. Chief integration officers will not only look into integration within and across enterprise ecosystems but will also define and implement integration techniques across the physical world, virtual world, and the Metaverse.

Culture will move from a growth mindset to a prosperity mindset where everyone wins (Ubuntu culture)
Last but not least, we will move ahead with the dictum “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Culture will differentiate leaders from the followers and laggards. The unique characteristics of humans and society that technology can’t replicate are emotions, a sense of belongingness, and appreciation. Organizations that differentiate through these characteristics will define and push the needle from a growth mindset to a growth-for-everyone mindset. Organizations of the future will no longer recognize individual heroes/merit. They will reward teams, communities, and sections which define common goals and take everyone to the finish line.

These are exciting times for technology, but today enterprises are leading this change by focusing on agility and composability in a hybrid world through the adoption of the high-velocity model.