Its the start of the year 2022 and riding on the headwinds of digital innovations, I am looking forward to these trends based on my conversations with enterprise stakeholders. Hope you would agree as well?

Trend 1 : From Great Resignation to Great Automation

Commonly known as ‘The Great Resignation’, talent with critical revenue generating skills are now recognized as Unicorns.

With lack of talent, enterprises would start looking at islands of manual processes or tasks , map them to the larger enterprise outcomes and define enterprise-wide automation initiatives. Decisions on what to automate would be made strategically based on business impact metrics such as time to market, time to value , quality & customer/brand value. All of the automations might not be achieved with existing technology capabilities available in the market and give rise to the need for developing custom, in-house automation agency.

Trend 2 : Rapid Decisions with Autonomic Computing

I came across the term ‘autonomic computing’ in this 2015 paper that proposes to solve most basic integration problems and enterprise software systems become more complicated.

Since then enterprise systems have become even more complicated and a bad customer experience often gets viral, impacting brand loyalty among over things.

A key aspect of business decision making is the right context such as – who is the customer? how many transactions did they have? how do these customers behave etc. Existing capabilities in the market can help enterprises consolidate linear business decisions into independent intelligent enterprise applications. These systems would ingest changing environment data and provide rapid responses that benefits the business by self-changing the underlying algorithms.

Trend 3 : Enterprise-Wide Privacy-Enhancing Tools

Today digital enterprises are producing petabytes of data for every interaction and then analyzed, processed & enriched by multitude of teams & AI models to produce essential insights that drive success.

Now as the data is processed by various teams apply adhoc data protection techniques. These range from PII suppression to encryption based on the use case. We have seen so many mishaps where correct privacy methods were not in place, resulting them to become newsmakers.

In 2022, digital enterprises would incorporate a customer privacy office that combines the legal & privacy teams defining ‘PII’ , ‘consent’ & ‘opt-in’ and the tech arm that implements them as tools, applications or frameworks across the enterprise. The objective would be to access personal data used across the org, minimize personal data collected and ensure accurate management so that the right team, have the right access for the right use case.

Trend 4 : Physital Experiences

Physital = Physical + Digital Experiences

I strongly believe that COVID-19 will become like common cold and with availability of over-the -counter pills it would be easier to socialize without restrictions. As the world starts to open up, face to face interactions would be essential to the customers before they make the next big purchase. Yes online purchase is definitely more faster, elegant and straightforward , but nothing beats the ability to touch and feel the product before paying the dime.

Physical stores with physical products will bring the luxury to look and feel the product before the deal is done. Computing would be available in abundance around these physical experiences with upcoming 5G and widely available Internet of Things. Just like the connected car and connected city, your nearest brick and mortar shop would have another shot at survival , respawned as a connected brick and mortar

Trend 5 : Higher Emphasis on Tech Skills, Less on Degrees

In the last few years enterprises have realized the need for right technology skills to ensure accelerated technology growth. Online learning is easily available today along with platform makers creating their own communities & knowledge base to deploy cloud services.

I believe this prediction would hold true for only a certain set of technology roles. As the technology talent crisis deepens later in 2022, I am expecting new roles that would bridge the gap between the technical and business talent within the enterprise.