Our 2020 technology trends are about working differently to deliver accelerating change to the enterprise. Our five trends signal that we’re on the cusp of the next step change in employee productivity. Wow, has this been a long time coming!
We reported our 2020 technology trends on dxc.technology. Below is my informal commentary on each trend.
1. AI redefines professional services
Companies are using AI to make their experts even better, build knowledgeable customers and provide advisory services to junior and mid-level professionals to improve their productivity. These AI-based services will help transfer knowledge across the organization in much more aggressive ways than past knowledge-sharing systems, and that’s a huge opportunity for business. This trend has the broadest scope of impact and variability of impact of this year’s trends. I don’t know exactly where it will settle, but I think we’re on the right trajectory. We’ll get better at dealing with unintentional bias and applying AI to improve outcomes. As a side note, we are already seeing a robot reboot in the RPA space as first-generation robots gain additional smarts (even Tesla is providing an upgrade).
2. Design thinking shifts from IT services for people to IT services for machines (M2M)
From a computer’s point of view, people take way too much time to make a decision. Machines make decisions very, very quickly as long as the information is flowing.
As the internet of things flows millions of times more data, in substantial detail, and we have more machines automating the work, designing for thinking machines is forcing a major system design change: Instead of bringing the information to the processing, we’re bringing the processing to the data. That means moving decisions to the edge —think hyper-local decisions.
Smart cities operate “full local,” smart driving goes full local, even consumer conversations become full local. By shifting to machine-to-machine (M2x) interaction speeds, we can pack much more intelligence into the problem we’re solving within the same decision window, or make more decisions per second. This means improved outcomes at increased scale. M2x is really going to change how we design systems in the enterprise as we think about moving from enterprise processes to hyper-local economies, smarter services in smarter cities, and predictively personalized services for consumers, patients, workers and travelers.
3. The value of data increases in ecosystems
Businesses are capitalizing on the data they have and merging it with other data for more value. CEOs must determine how to build a business model around a data ecosystem, and business leaders must obtain consent from individuals to have their data shared. Technologies such as self-sovereign identity and communities for mutually shared consent tied to blockchain will help. CEOs in automotive and healthcare are paving the way, sharing data because it creates a better experience for their customers or patients and improves financial performance.
Ecosystem thinking isn’t new, and enterprises have been edging closer. From “Data Gravity” anchoring new ecosystems in clouds, to “Federated Query” providing new ways to join disparate information bases, to new “Query Governance” strategies to help unlock sharing in the face of regulation a broad industry is emerging around this data ecosystem strategy.
4. Teams, not superstars, are the high performers
Shifting from individuals to teams is something enterprises will learn in earnest in 2020. Enterprises will test multifunctional teams with 2-week sprints, define user stories, and really begin to understand how to tune that agile process. We’ll see organizations come to life because once they start working as multifunctional interconnected teams, they’ll never go back. Instead of all the work going to your best person, it gets distributed more evenly among teams. We’ve seen this first-hand as we created Platform DXC and reorganized around agile, multifunctional teams. And in teams, people learn from each other. That creates a multiplier effect on experience that allows people to advance more quickly. So I’m really excited about this one.
5. A new wave of business leaders accelerates business transformation
Enterprises will be led in new ways by leaders who understand the intersection of business and technology. These leaders value agility, openness, experimental culture and the new team structures. It starts with the CEO and board, and runs through the entire organization. We all play every role — just to varying degrees. We’re all salespeople, we’re all technologists. If you don’t have the right leadership to establish the high-performing teams, you end up spending a lot of money and not getting the expected return. This leadership enables us to think differently about solving problems and work differently to create more comprehensive solutions.
I’d love to get your feedback on the trends and understand what you’re seeing on your 2020 horizon. Thank you.
