Technology outsourcing major CSC has released its enterprise IT trends that will shape business in 2017.
Dan Hushon, chief technology officer of CSC, says more and more businesses are marching forward toward their digital futures.
“As a result of this, entirely new business models will be built on a foundation of information-driven experiences and analytic innovations, all built on public clouds. In rethinking IT as a core part of the business, organizations across all markets must find the sweet spot of DevSecOps,” Hushon said.
Key technologies — augmented and virtual reality, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence and cloud computing — are among the six key trends that will help corporate leaders and CIOs to devise business strategies for 2017.
Reconfiguring the Enterprise for the 21st Century
Businesses have to rethink and reinvent new models and processes for agility. This rethinking will affect overall organizational structures, leadership cultures, talent selection, team style and partner ecosystems. Investments will need to be made in employee toolboxes that will allow for rapid deployment of processes and constant improvement.
The Rise of the Intelligent Machines
Machines are beginning to outthink their human counterparts and are able to perform much more complex computations and much broader information sets – complete with correlations and causality – to predict the best possible outcome. With the output of this high volume, high velocity data, organizations will need to build and eventually merge it into data ecosystems. The deeper the data ecosystems, the less sense it will make to transport the data back into the enterprise.
This provides for the emergence of cloud-based machine learning on artificial intelligence platforms. It also means that executives must become deeply, digitally savvy themselves and trained to weed out any digital biases (as was seen with the recent U.S. presidential election). The business and productivity implications of bringing information to the forefront of every employee’s job will drive this adoption.
Maturing of IoT and the Industrial Internet
There is broad-based adoption of IoT with pent-up demand for a platform that simplifies enterprise implementation in order to drive a return on investment. Sensors will be the key to this requirement and will provide a stream of data on the front end. With the increase in sensors on the network and the emergence of exponentially more bandwidth with 5G networking, productivity will explode such as it did in the 1990s when desktop computers entered the workplace.
Emergence of the Sinosphere as an Innovation Leader
The rise of the Sinosphere – the East Asian cultural sphere that includes Vietnam, Japan and South Korea – which has been historically influenced by China, is worth watching. This trend is leading to the emergence of the Digital Silk Road, which is beginning to rival Silicon Valley as a center of innovation.
Increased Adoption and Simplification of Cloud Platforms
CIOs are starting to implement an 80/20 plan, placing 80 percent of their workloads in the public cloud by 2020. As companies increase adoption, the current leaders in the public cloud will continue to outpace the rest of the competition. The leaders will begin to compete on function and capability, creating a new style of hybridization or cloud diversity.
The cloud diversity will allow companies to better meet regulatory and security requirements. A real-time platform will emerge as information moves directly from hand to code through a new class of middleware. The reduced complexity will free customers to build new platform business services in search of new organic sources of revenue that were not possible in the pre-cloud era, and achieve the potential that PaaS, IoT and applications platforms promise.
Next Wave of Digital Interface: Virtual and Augmented Reality
Investment in augmented and virtual reality is enabled by the combination of advanced computer-generated graphics, machine learning, high performance computing, data collection at the edge and analytics. Augmented reality will be behind IoT devices guiding employees and consumers to interact with their environment in new, more productive ways that are much richer than provided by mobile devices, especially in the areas of service and fulfillment.
