Every year the technology research and consulting company Gartner identifies technology trends it sees as critical to the business world. In 2022 they identified 12 strategic trends that could be seen to deliver business growth, digitalization, and efficiency. Following are the topics they saw as not only influencing business in 2022 but their influence spreading into 2023 and beyond.
Data Fabric
Data fabric provides a flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, making data available everywhere it’s needed regardless of where the data lives. It can also use analytics to learn and actively recommend where data should be used and changed. This can reduce data management efforts by up to 70%.
Cybersecurity Mesh
Cybersecurity mesh is a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services. This enables best-of-breed, stand-alone security solutions to work together to improve overall security while also moving control points closer to the assets they have been designed to protect. Quickly and reliably verifying identity, context and policy adherence across cloud and non-cloud environments.
Privacy-Enhancing Computation
Privacy-enhancing computation secures the processing of personal data in untrusted environments — which is increasingly critical due to evolving privacy and data protection laws as well as growing consumer concerns. Utilising a variety of privacy-protection techniques, allowing value to be extracted from data while also still meeting compliance requirements.
Cloud-Native Platforms
Cloud-native platforms are technologies that allow you to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile — enabling you to respond to rapid digital change. They also 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.
Composable Applications
Composable applications are built from business-centric modular components. Therefore, making it easier to use and reuse code, accelerating the time to market for new software solutions and releasing enterprise value.
Decision Intelligence
Decision intelligence is 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. Providing support and enhance human decision making and, potentially, automate it through the use of augmented analytics, simulations, and AI.
Hyper-automation
Hyper-automation is a disciplined, business-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Enabling scalability, remote operation, and business model disruption.
AI Engineering
AI engineering automates updates to data, models, and applications to streamline AI delivery. Combined with strong AI governance, AI engineering will operationalise the delivery of AI to ensure its ongoing business value.
Distributed Enterprises
Distributed enterprises reflect a digital-first, remote-first business model to improve employee experiences, digitalise consumer and partner touchpoints, and build out product experiences. These better serve the needs of remote employees and consumers, who are fuelling demand for virtual services and hybrid workplaces.
Total Experience
Total experience is a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth. This can drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy through holistic management of stakeholder experiences.
Autonomic Systems
Autonomic systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn from their environments and dynamically modify their own algorithms in real time to optimize their behaviour in complex ecosystems. Creating an agile set of technology capabilities that are able to support new requirements and situations, optimise performance and defend against attacks without human intervention.
Generative AI
Generative AI learns about artifacts from data and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but doesn’t repeat it. It 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.
You can read their full article here, where they delve into some of the commonly asked questions about the trends and how they drive digital business.
…Looking into 2023…
Gartner are not the only technology monitors out there who look at and identify possible trends which could influence how business will evolve with integrated use of Information Technology. The software company BlueSoft have a keen eye on the future of IT, as it is directly involved with the environment, creating bespoke solutions for companies around the world, and also looking at technologies and how they could drive their business forward. Following are seven areas that they see will be an integral part of the technology landscape beyond this year.
Accelerated Digital Transformation
From the time beyond the events of 2019, technology could be seen as growing steadily, with digitalisation developing one step at a time. The lockdown events of 2019 caused a shift in the way technological businesses worked and how students studying the topics approached the research and development environment. This shift also saw the redirection of funding away from various fields towards online initiatives. They expect that further investment will flow into the industry and speed up the over use of IT based solutions.
Ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence
This field of artificial intelligence development is one which will go well beyond just 2023s trends, with continual investment from various industries hoping to utilise the end product to improve their business standing. With AI processing data, recognising faces or even speech of individuals, allowing automated systems to guide users in the way they shop, carry out meaningful physical exercise, right down to even carrying out medical procedures without human intervention.
The Internet of Things
We are all aware of the influence and the impact of the Internet of Things in our everyday lives. This extensive network of electronic devices which automatically communicates and exchanges varying information and data directly through the internet. This seems to be a trend that doesn’t want to slow down, especially with the seemingly endless need for consumers to adopt the new trends. It is estimated that by 2030, each person with access to the technology will be using up to 20 IoT devices.
You could ask why anyone would need so many IoT devices. Or just ask the smart watches, smart bands, cleaning robots, fridges, medical equipment, water distribution and urban safety monitoring systems around us every day. A veritable rise of the machines…
Alternatives to cloud computing
There are more technologies out there over the horizon set to make the processing of data easier and faster than we see today. There are two popular technologies which seem to have more prospects than just the old cloud computing systems.
- Edge computing, where the data being processed is closer to the request.
- Fog computing, which is bringing big data management on to a new level.
5G networks
With this technology now being rolled out world wide there are continued developments in its speed and technology. Providing increased data transfer, which is essential for the newest technologies and IoT devices.
Augmented Reality
This technology has matured and moved from our entertainment in our lives and has expanded to be used in various working environments, like the military and also influencing medical procedures.
Rise of the chatbots
We already see the use of chatbots in everyday online interactions, where they have enhanced the customer experience by adding another layer onto the communication with clients, above and beyond the human point of contact. This ties in with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence in human machine interactions.
While some areas of the human world still prefer the one to one of discussing needs with other humans, the younger generations are being introduced to the human AI interaction at an earlier age, making it more accepted within the generations following the human population who originally thought the world of Artificial Intelligence was only part of science fiction and not part of science fact. See the written works of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke for the seeds which inspired some technologists to create the world around us today. You can read BlueSoft’s original article here.
More to come…
So, there we have it, for just now. Some of the technological trends for this year and next. Most of these technologies are already in the fledgling stage in the world around us, but mainly having their roots within the digital world. The question is what will come after, what will happen to the physical IT equipment we interact with today. Maybe, full body augmentation where we become another branch of the Internet of Things, doing away with the mundane physical trinkets we see and use….?