AS THE UNPRECEDENTED expansion of technology-driven innovation fuels a highstakes game of competitive whack-a-mole, an organization’s ability to exploit technology to its advantage will determine its survival. Leaders across sectors now routinely elevate technology to a strategic business priority. Emerging technology trends stir competing emotions and narratives, often pushing us beyond our comfort zones. We’re inseparable from our mobile devices, but they constantly interrupt us with an overwhelming flow of information. Cognitive assistants are helpful time-savers, but most of us find them a little creepy. Investors are bullish on flying taxis, but savvy consumers are distrustful of empty media hype and promises that exceed reality. And a painful tension exists between the possibilities of exciting novel technologies and the responsible exploration of technology domains at the forefront of an organization’s 18-to-24-month investment road map. Eleven years of research and deep engagement with global business and technology executives have helped bring clarity to this ongoing drama—and a simpler way to think about significant technology developments. Last year’s Tech Trends report1 explored nine macro technology forces that have been—and continue to be—the backbone of business innovation and transformation: digital experience, analytics, cloud, digital reality, cognitive technologies, blockchain, the business of technology, risk, and core modernization. For a decade, we’ve been tracking their emergence and eventual ascent, exploring how organizations are using them to innovate and drive purposeful, transformational change. Digital experience, analytics, and cloud are enabling technologies that have proven their value— and then some—over the past decade. They are the basis of numerous successful corporate strategies and new business models. This decade’s disruptors are digital reality, cognitive technologies, and blockchain. Adoption is on the uptake, with business cases multiplying across industries. We expect these disruptors to spark surprises throughout the 2020s. The business of technology, risk, and core modernization are foundational technologies. To carry the weight of technology-driven transformation and innovation initiatives, they need to be stable, strong, and sustainable. These macro forces help drive meaningful conversations about emerging technologies not only with the CIO, CTO, and tech shop but with the CEO and the broader C-suite, board members, and line-of-business presidents. Discussing emerging technologies in the context of this framework can help simplify the tsunami of tech advances and ground in reality the investments and innovations coming from labs, startups, and R&D centers around the world. Smaller trends can be plotted on the evolutionary trajectory of these macro forces. This year’s update takes a fresh look at enterprise adoption of these macro forces and reviews how they’re shaping the tech trends predicted to disrupt businesses over the next 18 to 24 months. We also peek beyond the horizon and unveil three macro forces—ambient experience, exponential intelligence, and quantum—that we expect to shape enterprise and technology strategies into the 2030s and beyond.
Digital experience continues to be a critical driver of enterprise transformation— in fact, 64 percent of participants in Deloitte’s 2018 global CIO survey say digital technologies will affect their businesses in the next three years.2 Since we examined this trend last year in Beyond marketing: Experience reimagined, 3 organizations are dispensing with the traditional notion of customer acquisition-focused marketing, focusing instead on creating more human-centric interactions—including with their own employees and business partners. This year, in human experience platforms, we discuss how leading organizations are creating customized, emotionally intelligent digital experiences based on individuals’ behaviors, preferences, and emotions using an integrated array of AI capabilities such as voice stress analysis and microexpression detection tools. Consider, for example, the use of EEG- and machine learning-enabled headsets that shed light on situations that distract or create stress for employees, enabling businesses to design better workflows and work environments.
Analytics includes foundational capabilities and tools that generate powerful insights. Data management, data governance, and supporting architecture are ageold problems that not only are critical building blocks for AI programs but are tactical concerns as organizations work in a dynamic and complex regulatory environment with mandates on data residency, privacy, and usage. CIOs understand what’s at stake: 60 percent of them say that data and analytics will affect their businesses in the next three years.4 But the issue is becoming only more challenging. The tried-and-true concepts of “data at rest” and “data in use” are joined by “data in motion,” which is supported by tools for data streaming, ingestion, classification, storage, and access. The good news? Cloud, core modernization, cognitive, and other technologies are bringing fresh solutions to an exceptionally complicated challenge. Developments in data analytics have helped advance many of this year’s trends. For example, the ability to efficiently and cost-effectively process and integrate large amounts of data has spurred the creation of more advanced digital twin technology— but it has also created a deficit of trust, leading to our focus on ethical technology and trust.
Cloud’s takeover of the enterprise is nearly complete. Ninety percent of organizations use cloud-based services5 and they aren’t putting on the brakes. In fact, cloud investments are expected to double as a percentage of IT budget over the next three years.6 As we predicted in 2017, the use of cloud, extending beyond infrastructure, has given rise to everything-as-a-service, enabling any IT function to become a cloudbased service for enterprise consumption.7 Hyperscalers—the handful of massive companies that dominate the public cloud and cloud services industries8 —have shifted investments higher up the stack, providing platforms for advanced innovation in the other macro forces, including analytics, cloud, blockchain, digital reality, and in the future, quantum. Cloud has also forced the reimagining of some tried-and-true roles. For example, as we discuss in architecture awakens, giving architects the ability to take full advantage of modern cloud-based offerings plays a critical role in developing complex IT systems and applications in a hybrid world.
Access to Innovation
