Deloitte has released ‘Tech Trends 2018: The symphonic enterprise’, the latest edition of its annual in-depth examination of emerging trends in enterprise technology.
Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2018 spotlights eight key trends that could potentially impact business strategies and outcomes. This year’s theme, ‘The symphonic enterprise’, is an idea that describes strategy, technology, and operations working together, in harmony, across domains and boundaries.
Among the trends featured in this year’s report are:
- Digital reality: represents the next phase in the augmented reality and virtual reality revolution;
- No-collar workforce: discusses HR strategies for managing environments in which humans and machines work together as equals; and
- The new core: examines how core systems and the information they contain are driving digital convergence and breaking down traditional operational boundaries.
Tech Trends 2018 features the ‘Exponential technology watch list’ which discusses strategies for exploring and harnessing innovation ideas that may not manifest for five years or more. It also explores two longer-term technology trends: artificial general intelligence and quantum encryption.
“Technology trends are no longer just the CIO’s or CTO’s responsibility. It’s become a CxO, CEO and even board-level conversation,” said Bill Briggs, Chief Technology Officer and Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “We now see many forward-thinking organizations approach disruptive change more strategically. Instead of launching separate, domain-specific initiatives, they are thinking about exploration, use cases and deployment more holistically. Increasingly, they are focusing on how multiple disruptive technologies can work together to drive meaningful and measurable impact across the enterprise.”
Here is a closer look at some of the trends that could offer opportunities and challenges across industries during the next 18 to 24 months:
- No-collar workforce: The rise of automation, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies will impact jobs and job families. The organization of the future must rewire talent management for the new hybrid human-machine workforce—simultaneously retraining augmented workers and pioneering new HR processes for managing virtual workers.
- Blockchain to blockchains: Blockchain is moving rapidly from exploration into mission-critical production scenarios. Advanced use cases and increased adoption drives the need to coordinate, integrate and orchestrate multiple blockchains across a value chain.
- Digital reality: In the next phase of augmented reality and virtual reality’s evolution, companies are focusing less on the novelty of cool devices, and are focusing instead on developing strategies and innovative use cases. As this trend unfolds, IT leaders will work to tackle persistent challenges in core integration, cloud deployment, connectivity and access.
“The old lines are blurring,” Briggs continued. “Instead of thinking within industry and business line verticals, and business process or technology platform horizontals, we’re entering a world of diagonals – transcending technical scope and traditional organizational boundaries. These technology trends are enabling an entirely new way of solving problems and uncovering business opportunities. The symphonic enterprise is unified; it’s the controlled collision of trends, with strategy, technology and operations working in harmony to imagine tomorrow, and get there from the realities of today.”
The report features case studies, perspectives from industry luminaries, and insights from Deloitte practitioners. As in prior years, it provides an 18-24 month outlook on technology trends.