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BCS Author Predicts Disruptive Business Trends for 2017
CIOs need to embrace four strategic technology trends when planning for the year ahead - says BCS author Nicholas D. Evans.
He predicts that in 2017, one of the only constants will be change. The coming year will be highlighted by organisations taking a more holistic focus around digital transformation that taps into the power of technology combinations, together with platform business models, mastery of digital services, and leading practices in corporate innovation.
The use of IoT and intelligent automation, as well as wearables and augmented reality applications will be mega-trends that empower and expand digital business scenarios in the years ahead as well as continuing to raise many issues and challenges along the way in terms of privacy, safety and security. Platform business models will likely generate some of the highest magnitude business disruptions in the years ahead as they dissolve industry boundaries and hyper-extend the limits of the customer journey from one industry to another.
In 2017, the most successful organisations will be those that can develop an end-to-end digital capability that spans design and development all the way to deployment and management so that they can continuously evolve their digital services over time with tremendous agility and at high levels of sophistication and scale.
On the innovation front, there will be more focus on “where to play” and “how to scale”. Technologies such as robotic market intelligence will help managers keep better tabs on emerging market trends and technologies, and simulation techniques and algorithms will help managers run “what-if” scenarios for exploring their world-building, digital futures.
Nicholas concludes: “At a turning point in the war, in November 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. This sentiment could not be more true for digital transformation.
As the technology industry matures, and the discipline of digital transformation matures along with it, perhaps the most important elements to bear in mind in 2017 are those of value networks, technology combinations, digital assembly lines, and connected innovation.
