Digital transformation in 2022 and beyond: These are the key trends – ZDNet

At the beginning of 2022 many parts of the world were adapting to living with the Covid-19 pandemic — which is far from over plus seems to be settling into a pattern of repeated new-variant waves and a relentless build-up of Long Covid .  

Then, within February, the particular Russian invasion of Ukraine delivered another global shock, further disrupting supply chains and pushing up energy prices . For businesses, the consequent rise in inflation and threat of recession has added further pressure after a difficult two-and-a-half years.  

The pandemic drove many changes in the relationships between businesses and their customers and employees — most notably a shift towards online plus remote rather than in-person interaction. Last year , ZDNet outlined how digital transformation had “proved its worth during the particular pandemic, with more digitally mature companies generally proving resilient in the face of serious disruption”.  

The particular signs are that these pandemic-driven structural changes will become permanent: for example, many workers who pivoted to remote or hybrid work have no desire to return in order to the office on a permanent basis.  

All this means that businesses will need the clear roadmap for the deployment associated with new technologies to help them survive and prosper, whatever social and economic headwinds they may face in the particular future — ‘smart’ digital transformation, if you like.  

For example , in ’emergency’ digital change mode, IT managers rushed to equip remote workers with new laptops and other devices, and train them up upon collaboration tools in order to stay connected during lockdowns. By contrast, in ‘smart’ mode, organisations will need to examine exactly how their entire employee experience (EX) programmes can be retooled for greater flexibility and productivity going forward. Clearly, companies that had already done this particular before the pandemic are now within a much better position.  

Successful digital modification requires an understanding not only of the capabilities of new systems, but also of customers’ and employees’ evolving requirements, and the overall direction associated with the business. Companies must also have the particular leadership in place to make the correct decisions on technology investments.  

That’s the focus of this article, as well as the remainder of ZDNet’s 2022 electronic transformation special report.  

Digital alteration predictions with regard to 2022 

Towards the end of 2021, with the particular Covid-19 outbreak in full flow despite widespread vaccine rollouts (in developed countries) plus with the Ukraine crisis still to come, IDC released its predictions regarding digital change for better in 2022 and beyond.  

The analyst firm made 10 specific predictions (listed below), which were underpinned by a series of drivers, including: a multi-platform digital ecosystem; the particular need in order to embrace ‘digital first’ company strategies; the reimagining associated with engagement along with customers, business partners, suppliers along with other constituents; environmental and social responsibility; ‘globalization 2. 0’ plus supply chain issues; pervasive disruption across industries and environments; plus future electronic enterprises that will thrive via agile innovation.

Here are some of the particular key elements of IDC’s digital transformation forecasts for 2022 (ZDNet emphasis), with selected comments from IDC executives:

1. Direct electronic transformation investments accelerate to 16. 5% CAGR 2022-2024   becoming 55% of all ICT investment simply by the finish of 2024.

“Two years ago, 73% of most companies did not possess a digital roadmap: regardless of their approach to strategy, these people didn’t have a plan that will says ‘how do I go through where I am today to where I’ll become in the future? ‘ Now we see a full 50% associated with organizations have either a roadmap where the digital plan mirrors the business plan, or the electronic plan is the company strategy. That’s a dramatic increase, ” (Shawn Fitzgerald, research director, worldwide digital transformation strategies, at IDC).

2 . Simply by 2023, 90% of worldwide organizations will prioritize opportunities in electronic tools in order to augment physical spaces plus assets with digital experiences.

3. By 2025, 60% of organizations will capitalize on disruption with an enterprise- and ecosystem-wide method of automation , leveraging model-based enterprise concepts, and low/no-code platforms.

4. By 2026, 54% associated with CIOs drive business improvement, empowering electronically resilient organizations via strategic technology roadmaps, and replatforming to enable an agile, data-driven, collaborative workforce.

“What the CIO is trying to do will be create the fertile ground for development: it’s not just about optimising spending upon costs (cloud, infrastructure, applications, the ecosystem), it’s more about creating options to get the line of business in order to do things, to innovate, to get to that contextualization, which is the phase [of digital transformation] we’re on the doorstep associated with now, inch (Bob Parker).

5. Leveraging low code/no code tool and data utilization capability, the majority of employees at 60% of enterprises will lead transformation plus embody digital resiliency at their roles by 2024. And by 2025, companies along with cross functional leadership, a digital dream team , enjoy faster rates of innovation, higher market share gains, and greater operational efficiencies than their contemporaries.  

IDC’s predictions plus analysis provide an excellent framework pertaining to thinking about how electronic transformation is usually developing, and where it’s likely to go next. For another snapshot of the particular state associated with play, all of us examined the sizeable sample (25) of articles on the subject and assigned the cited trends plus predictions to different categories.  

Here’s the general picture that will emerged:  

Let’s examine the leading trends and predictions.  

Analytics, AI, ML & RPA 

Companies are usually awash with data, both structured and unstructured, plus a key component associated with digital transformation is finding ways to unlock business value from all that information, preferably in real time. ‘Analytics’ is an umbrella term that covers the processing of company data using algorithms to identify patterns and elucidate underlying processes, with the aim of improving the particular organisation’s performance. When information sets are used in order to train algorithms to perform various operations automatically when presented with similar information, it can called artificial intelligence (AI) — or, to avoid confusion along with actual human intelligence, machine learning (ML). RPA (robotic process automation) is the application of analytics, AI plus ML to specific business processes that previously required human action. Developments in all these areas are set to continue apace in 2022 and beyond.  

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Low-code/no-code tools & data use, data fabric 

Businesses might have access to copious data and employ teams of analysts and developers to streamline core business processes, but they often struggle to satisfy the demand for innovative apps and services from business units — which in many ways is the engine room of real digital transformation.  

This is where low-code and no-code tools come in, as they allow non-developers to build applications using common building blocks and simple graphical interfaces. A key requirement for successful low-code development is controlled access to well-managed APIs plus data, the latter increasingly delivered via a data fabric , which analyst firm Gartner describes as a “flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms in addition to business users, making information available everywhere it’s needed regardless where the info lives”.  

According to Gartner , 70% associated with new applications developed by organisations will use low-code or no-code technologies simply by 2025, up from less than 25% in 2020. Other recent developments include: fusion teams comprising both coders and non-coders; tools that convert low code from graphical tools into code that can be incorporated into CI/CD pipelines; and even AI-assisted code analysis.  

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Cloud-native equipment / multi-cloud / XaaS 

Early cloud migrations employed the ‘lift-and-shift’ approach, rehosting on-premises workloads in order to cloud infrastructure with minimal application-level changes. However, more profound electronic transformation is available if applications are rebuilt, or developed from scratch, to be cloud-native , making use regarding containers, microservices, REST APIs and other technologies that can deliver improved flexibility, scalability together with resilience. Gartner predicts that will over 95% of new electronic digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by simply 2025, upward from 30% in 2021.  

Most organisations — 89% within Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report — use multiple cloud providers, with regard to various reasons, including access to particular services, vendor lock-in avoidance, compliance, and hedging against outages. However, multi-cloud adoption comes in several forms: in the survey, only 25% involving organisations reported using ‘intelligent workload placement’, compared to 45% who had ‘apps siloed on different clouds’ and additionally 44% who employed ‘DR/Failover between clouds’.  

Going beyond the particular traditional pillars of typically the cloud ‘as-a-service’ model (infrastructure [IaaS], platform [PaaS] and software [SaaS]), XaaS, or ‘everything like a service’, has expanded to include storage, containers, functions, security, unified communications not to mention video, among other things. As the barriers to cloud adoption — security, lack of resources and expertise, cloud spend management, for example — continue to fall, this list can only get longer.  

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Cybersecurity & privacy  

Cybersecurity and also privacy protection are intimately connected as well as increasingly important digital transformation issues. As we’ve noted, businesses and other organisations routinely process and store enormous amounts of files, including personal information about their customers — names, addresses, bank and credit card details, purchase history and more. This records allows companies to create personalised experiences that provide value to be able to customers plus competitive advantage to the company. However , clients need to know of which they can trust companies with this sensitive data — and the endless parade connected with breaches clearly demonstrates the fact that this is currently far through the case.  

More internal and external business processes are being digitised and migrated towards the impair, and organisations are becoming even more physically dispersed, all of which increases the attack surface, and therefore the likelihood with security breaches. As businesses pursue their digital change strategies, this new systems they deploy will need to be secure by means of default , and adhere to a zero-trust model .  

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Remote & hybrid work 

The emergency shift for you to remote working for many employees during lockdown has now evolved into the widespread, in addition to likely permanent, adoption of a hybrid model in which usually workers divide their time flexibly between home and even office. We’re now inside a phase where organisations are operating out precisely which implementation of this cross model works best for them — together with, of course, some businesses might lean closer to traditional working practices than others, depending on the sector they occupy.  

Digital transformation in the hybrid-work era will focus on creating and additionally servicing ‘distributed enterprises’ with a mix for office- not to mention home-based employees. By 2023, according to Gartner , 75% of companies that exploit distributed enterprise benefits will see revenue growth 25% faster than competitors.  

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Automation & hyper-automation 

The automation of the wide range of enterprise processes will be a key focus for a digital transformation efforts in 2022 and beyond, ranging coming from the elimination of simple menial tasks from human to-do lists to the creation of composable event-driven IT architectures. Workflows within the latter category, which often will increasingly leverage low code/no code and AI/ML technologies, go under often the banner about ‘hyper-automation’, which in turn Gartner explains as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as numerous business and also IT processes as possible”.  

“Gartner research shows that the top-performing hyper-automation teams focus upon three key priorities: improving the quality of work, speeding up organization processes, as well as enhancing your agility in decision-making, ” based on Gartner research vice president David Groombridge .  

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