Gartner Symposium is currently under way in Orlando, and the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Intelligent:
1. AI Foundation
AI has massive potential to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience. Many organizations have already taken notice of this, with a recent Gartner survey indicating that 59% or organizations are gathering information to build an AI strategy, while the rest are piloting or adopting AI programs. Given that AI techniques are rapidly evolving, and organizations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes and tools, it is suggested that business focus on tightly scoped solutions targeting specific tasks. With Gartner estimating that by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top 5 investment priorities, now is the time to invest in data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
2. Intelligent Apps & Analytics
AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors, with AI expected to be incorporated into every application, app and service, at least on some level. Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. Organizations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences
3. Intelligent Things
As the IoT grows to encompass an increasing number of things, AI and machine will enable these things to operate autonomously or semi-autonomously. For example, a robotic vacuum with computer vision could navigate and clean a house with minimal intervention. As the technology advances, swarms of intelligent things will work collaboratively to achieve a goal.
Digital:
4. Digital Twin
Digital twins, which are digital representations of real-world systems, offer information on the status of their real-world counterpart. These representations can respond to changes or improve operations, potentially saving companies billions of dollars in maintenance repair and operations. While most examples of digital twins today exist within the IoT space, there are a growing potential for digital twins to exist for objects that are not actually “thinks,” such as a digital twin for a human that offers biometrics and medical data to doctors, or a digital twin for a city, that could offer information to city planners about operations and maintenance.
5. Edge computing
Edge computing moves computation and processing closer to the user/thing, or the “edge” of the network. When compared to traditional cloud computing, this reduces the communication bandwidth needed and eliminates the latency between sensors and the cloud. As autonomous vehicles, drones, and other robotic technologies continue to mature, the need to real-time processing of vast amounts of information will only grow.
6. Conversational Platforms
Conversational platforms are changing how people interact with the digital world. Rather than having to learn how the computer communicates (aka learn the interface), conversational platforms enable the user to convey their intent using natural language. Over the next few years, conversational interfaces will become a primary design goal for user interaction, and may become the primary way that users communicate with the online world.
7. Immersive Experiences
Virtual reality (VR), which places the user in a digitally rendered environment and augmented reality (AR) which overlays digital information on the real world, are dissolving the boundaries between the digital and physical world. Now, mixed reality (MR), which merges and extends both AR and VR, is becoming the experience of choice. Combined with conversational platforms and the IoT, these technologies will usher in a fundamental shift to invisible, immersive, ubiquitous computing
Mesh:
8. Blockchain
The blockchain is a shared, distributed decentralized and tokenized ledger that removes business friction by being independent of individual applications or participants. While there is significant potential in the long term for untrusted parties to exchange commercial transactions, the next two to three years will be more hype than tangible benefit. That said, organizations can still position themselves to take advantage of the technology by understanding the potential business opportunities, as well as the capabilities and limitations of the technology.
9. Event Driven
Digital business moments, which are a combination of business events that reflect the discovery of notable states or state changes, will drive digital business. While a simple example would be the signal that a purchase order has been completed, as the IoT and other technologies emerge, complex events can be detected more quickly and analyzed in greater detail. Gartner suggests that enterprises should embrace “event thinking,” given that by 2020, event-sourced, real-time situational awareness will be a required characteristic for 80% of digital business solutions, and 80% of new business ecosystems will require support for event processing.
10. Continuous Adaptive Risk & Trust
The security world is constantly changing as threats and threat protection evolves, as evidenced by the string of high profile hacks over the summer. Continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) allows for real-time, risk and trust-based decision making with adaptive responses to security-enable digital business. To make CARTA a reality, organizations should explore integrating security into their DevOps efforts to deliver a continuous SevSecOps process, as well a explore deception technologies to catch bad actors that have penetrated the organization’s network.
Thanks to Brandon Metzger for his role in pulling together this information.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
