The latest IDC report said 65 percent of GDP will be digitalized by 2022, driving $6.8 trillion of IT spending from 2020 to 2023 as most products and services will be based on a digital delivery model.
CIOs and digitally driven C-suites need to focus on three areas over the next five years. They need to remediate any shortcomings in existing IT environments that were introduced during the initial emergency response.
ALSO READ: on-demand replay of IDC’s IT Industry Predictions webinar
They need to identify where the crisis and their organization’s response has accelerated IT transformation trends and lock in these advances.
They must seek opportunities to leverage technologies to take advantage of competitive / industry disruptions and extend capabilities for business acceleration.
Top ten IT industry predictions
# 1 The Shift to Cloud-Centric Accelerates
By the end of 2021, 80 percent of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic. CIOs must accelerate the transition to a cloud-centric IT model to maintain competitive parity and to make the organization more digitally resilient.
# 2 Edge Becomes a Top Priority
Through 2023, reactions to changed workforce and operations practices during the pandemic will be the dominant accelerators for 80 percent of edge-driven investments and business model changes in most industries.
#3 The Intelligent Digital Workspace
By 2023, 75 percent of G2000 companies will commit to providing technical parity to a workforce that is hybrid by design rather than by circumstance, enabling them to work together separately and in real time. The result will be a more collaborative, informed, and productive workforce.
# 4 The Pandemic’s IT Legacy
Through 2023, coping with technical debt accumulated during the pandemic will shadow 70 percent of CIOs, causing financial stress, inertial drag on IT agility, and “forced march” migrations to the cloud. Smart CIOs will look for opportunities to design next-generation digital platforms that modernize and rationalize infrastructure and applications while delivering flexible capabilities to create and deliver new products, services, and experiences to workers and customers.
# 5 Resiliency is Central to the Next Normal
In 2022, enterprises focused on digital resiliency will adapt to disruption and extend services to respond to new conditions 50 percent faster than ones fixated on restoring existing business/IT resiliency levels. Leading enterprises must be able to rapidly adapt to business disruptions, leverage digital capabilities to maintain continuous business operations, and quickly adjust to take advantage of changed conditions for competitive advantage.
# 6 A Shift Towards Autonomous IT Operations
By 2023, an emerging cloud ecosystem for extending resource control and real-time analytics will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere. Achieving these objectives will require aggressive integration of proactive AI/ML powered analytics, adoption of policy driven automation, and greater use of low code, serverless workflows to enable consistent self-driving infrastructure.
# 7 Opportunistic AI Expansion
By 2023, driven by the goal to embed intelligence in products and services, one quarter of G2000 companies will acquire at least one AI software start-up to ensure ownership of differentiated skills and IP. Successful organizations will eventually sell internally developed industry-specific software and data services as a subscription, leveraging deep domain knowledge to open profitable new revenue streams.
# 8 Relationships Are Under Review
By 2024, 80 percent of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers, and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and for autonomous IT operations.
# 9 Sustainability Becomes a Factor
By 2025, 90 percent of G2000 companies will mandate reusable materials in IT hardware supply chains, carbon neutrality targets for providers’ facilities, and lower energy use as prerequisites for doing business.
# 10 People Still Matter
Through 2023, half of enterprises’ hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in building IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools/skills. To address the shortage of developer and data analytics talent, enterprises will turn to flexible talent sources, crowdsourcing, and internal staff to meet their development/automation and advanced analytics needs and to speed up innovation.
