Deloitte is one of the biggest accounting firms and professional services network. It provides audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk, and financial advisory services. Under the Deloitte brand, tens of thousands of professionals in independent firms collaborate worldwide. Deloitte publishes an annual technology trends report identifying key trends that have the most potential to impact businesses. For the year 2021, Deloitte has recognized nine trends that are likely to influence businesses in the upcoming months. The report offers advice about strategy, risk, and financial implications to empower business decision-makers. This article will simplify nine trends for you.
Modern technology provides new opportunities for some organizations and threatens the survival of others. Corporate strategy and technology strategy are increasingly becoming interrelated. To expand their business with technology, strategists consider many future possibilities and look beyond their organization’s capabilities. However, the uncertainties and prospects can confuse the human brain. That’s why strategists consult analytics, automation, and AI-enabled technology platforms. Organizations use these tools to identify internal and external strategic forces, make decisions, and observe results. Consequently, the companies turn strategy development from infrequent, time-consuming to continuous and dynamic, enabling strategists to be more creative about many future likelihoods.
Organizations enhance their potential dramatically when they undergo digital transformation and move their business to the cloud. However, these transformations usually come with a hefty price tag. For some companies, the costs can even become prohibitive. Nevertheless, the report suggests that this is about to change. Recently, some pioneering companies started outsourcing arrangements to modernize the conventional business. Others are investigating possibilities to shift core assets to low-code cloud platforms. To avoid the uncertainty involved in traditional businesses, the report predicts these modernization strategies would soon become standard procedures.
Manufacturers are now more future-focused, and supply chains value customer segmentation and product differentiation. The retailers and distributors overlook supply chain costs. Instead, they try to be more customer-focused. They collect valuable data for analysis. Many organizations use robots, drones, and advanced image recognition to minimize physical interactions and make the supply chain productive and safe. Although it is challenging to transform established supply chains, it will become crucial for organizations’ survival.
Artificial Intelligence can help companies analyze data and make decisions by recognizing patterns, identifying irregularities, making predictions, and producing insights. Machine learning models have become key drivers of productivity. However, new ML models’ development is slow due to inefficient development and deployment processes, which restrict collaboration among product teams, operational staff, and data scientists. Once the AI and ML models evolve, the AI scaling for business transformation becomes easy. Assisting in applying development and IT Operational tools and strategies to deliver industrial-scale ML, from development and deployment to maintenance and management.
Machine learning is set to modernize enterprise operations and decision-making. AI developers recognize that the legacy models and infrastructure intended to support human decision-making can restrict ML potential. Therefore, the organizations want to overhaul the data management value chain. They use the latest technologies such as advanced data capture and structuring, data analytics and insight generation, and cloud data repositories to support complex modeling. These tools help organizations utilize big-data for the future when machines execute real-time decisions and augment human decision-making.
Cyberattacks often undermine traditional organizations’ cybersecurity measures. The Zero-trust concept implies that we cannot inherently trust any user, workload, device, and network. In zero-trust infrastructures, access needs validation based on user identity, device, location, and other parameters, providing context to each connection and allowing more risk-based judgments. These architectures treat datasets, applications, workloads, and other components as manageable individual parts to restrain security breaches.
Access is based on the principle of least privilege. Implementing zero-trust security architectures can help strengthen and simplify security management, enhance the end-user experience, and facilitate modern enterprise environments. Shifting to zero-trust requires overhauling foundational cybersecurity issues, automation of manual processes, and transforming the security organization.
Few questions are on everyone’s mind. When, how, and if the digital workplace is going to be rebooted soon. The historical work-from-home experiment is happening globally. Business decision-makers are struggling to predict if work-from-home becomes the norm after the world reopens. They wonder if sustainable permanent remote work is possible and how productivity and employee well-being is affected. The role and need for a physical office are being passionately debated. Business leaders fear that the innovation may suffer in the absence of face-to-face peer interactions. Companies can even use this opportunity to their advantage by welcoming the positive aspects of remote work.
They may overcome productivity shortfalls by utilizing the data generated by workers’ tools and platforms. This encourages individual and team performance and offers the employee a customized experience based on personalized recommendations. It enables remote work to be far more than just replacing the conventional office. While most people work remotely, organizations may utilize data to create more productive, eco-friendly, and cost-effective offices that operate in harmony with remote work.
2020 will be regarded as the turning point in digital transformation for individuals and organizations. Most people will adapt to the digital lifestyle. They work from home, learn online schooling, and shop on the internet. Yet many people can’t wait to return to the office and interact in person. The report anticipates that consumers would want a blend of both physical and digital experience. They would expect personalized, in-person experiences with the convenience of online transactions. The physical and digital distinction will become vaguer in the coming months, and online and offline communications will merge.
Businesses now embrace diversity, equity and equality, and inclusion as business principles. A growing number of companies adopt holistic, organization-wide workforce approaches to address biases and inequities to enhance enterprise and worker experience. Resulting in improved employee satisfaction and increased productivity. HR professionals develop DEI strategies. Technology experts assist in implementing tech-enabled solutions to address intricate DEI challenges. The report predicts that organizations will incorporate advanced AI analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning-based automation to estimate the results of DEI.