Gatner annually conducts a study on technological trends that can be considered in strategic planning for companies that use technology to offer their products or services.
The research aims to drive continuous innovation, with new practices that can change or enhance existing technological business models.
This year was no different, and the research has a top 10 of trends to be considered for the market not only in 2020, but in a time span of five years.
Learn in this article, what are the technology trends for 2020 not only for business transformation but also insights that exploit technology for administration and modernization of operational processes within a company.
Hyper automation
Automation already makes it easier to perform tasks that originally required some form of human action. Through the Learning Machine, many time-consuming manual tasks or processes now rely on systems that learn by "imitating" human action and execute them quickly in an automated fashion.
Automation remains a trend for the coming years, but in a combined form of multiple software and tools that will cover even more tasks and processes together.
Hyper automation does not just refer to the multiple use of tools, but the comprehensiveness of all the steps of automation itself (discover, analyze, design, automate, measure, monitor, and re-evaluate).
IT architecture will be required to reconfigure operations and processes in response to evolving market needs and competitive threats. Hyper automation can only be achieved through this restructuring in practices and tools.
Multi-experience
By 2028, the user experience will undergo significant changes in the way the user handles and interacts with the digital world. Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are changing the way people deal with the digital world.
The ability to communicate with users through many human senses will provide more advantageous environments to deliver differentiated information.
Multi experience can also be called ambient experience, as this trend seeks to stimulate all human senses by incorporating a full range of input and output channels delivered across multiple devices and scenarios.
The most common uses will be for product design visualization; training and simulations; service and field operations.
Democratization
Democratization here, is focused on access to technical knowledge or experience in the commercial domain, in such a simple way that anyone can access it without the need for extensive training.
It is worth noting, that the goal of this trend is to be able to pass on knowledge to anyone inside or outside the company, including customers, business partners, executives, salespeople, assembly line workers, etc.
There are four main aspects of the democratization trend that are accelerating in 2020:
- Democratization of application development: Provides the creation of AI tool templates, APIs and middleware that enable the building/training, deployment and consumption of running Learning machine models for pre-built cloud-enabled infrastructure services.
- Democratization of data and analytics: The tools used to create AI-based solutions are an expansion from tools targeted at data scientists, to tools targeted at the professional developer community.
- Democratization of design: Low-code application development tools and platforms will help in the development of enhanced solutions such as the low-code and no-code phenomenon.
- Democratization of knowledge: IT professionals will increasingly have access to specialized tools and systems that enable them to explore and apply learned skills.
Increased human capacity
Humans have always used technology and science to enhance their ability, even before the introduction of the computer, there was the typewriter, the eyeglass, the copy machine to publish text... These are all examples of human enhancement.
The digital age has added new dimensions to human augmentation such as word processing, web pages, blogs, and social media that increase our ability to learn and communicate.
Human augmentation is a trend for the coming years as it explores how technology can be used in various arenas to provide cognitive and physical information. It is an excellent example of innovation that is linked to other trends such as:
- Cognitive and physical augmentation: It brings impacts on sensory augmentation, biological functions, genetics and brain.
- Increase in cultural and ethical aspects: Brings positive impacts on security, privacy, compliance, health, and ethics.
Transparency and traceability
Digital ethics and privacy are growing concerns for individuals, organizations, and governments alike.
Consumers are increasingly aware that their personal information is valuable and demand control. Organizations recognize the risk of protecting and managing personal data, while governments are implementing stringent legislation to ensure data protection.
Legislation such as the GPDR in the US and Europe, and the LGPD in Brazil, helps ensure that information about people is protected and used correctly, giving the individual the power to consent to the use of their data, deny use later, and be aware of the treatment and purpose that companies have in mind.
There are 6 elemental keys that bring the totality of this trend, they are: Ethics, integrity, accessibility of data handling, proper management, competence in protecting data, consistency and documentation in data handling and protection steps.
Edge Computing
Edge computing builds on the concepts of local processing to reduce latency, exploit edge resources, and enable greater autonomy.
Much of the current focus on edge computing comes from the need for IoT systems to provide disconnected or distributed resources in the embedded world of IoT for specific industries, such as manufacturing or retail.
Edge computing will be a dominant factor in virtually every industry and use case as the edge is empowered with increasing sophistication and specialized computing and data storage capabilities.
Distributed cloud
A distributed cloud refers to a public cloud service to different locations outside the cloud providers' datacenters, while the public cloud provider takes responsibility for operation, governance, maintenance and updates.
According to Gatner, this represents a significant shift from the centralized model of most public cloud services and will lead to a new era in cloud computing.
Autonomous things
Autonomous things are nothing more than physical devices that use AI to automate functions previously performed by humans. Today, the most recognizable forms are robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and human assistive devices.
The trend is for programming models that exploit AI to provide advanced behaviors that interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people.
With technological capabilities advancing rapidly, regulatory licenses and social acceptance are likely to increase in relation to autonomous things.
Practical Blockchain
Blockchain is an expanding list of irrevocable, cryptographically signed transactional records shared by all participants in a network.
Blockchain provides trust in untrusted environments, eliminating the need for a central authority.
With the potential to reshape industries by enabling trust, providing transparency, and allowing value exchange between business ecosystems. Assets can be traced back to their origin, significantly reducing opportunities for substitution of counterfeit products.
The trend is for blockchain to become scalable and be used in many areas, not just product and service transactions.
Total Security
In the next five years, AI and machine learning will be applied to augment human decision making in a variety of cases.
At the same time, there will be an increase in attack points targeting IoT, cloud computing, micro services, and highly connected systems in smart spaces.
While these trends bring opportunities to businesses in many segments, they create significant challenges for security professionals and risk leaders.
Thus, total security becomes a trend to enhance security defense by using machine learning to understand patterns.
Bonus: People centric
This bonus applies to all aspects of your business. By putting people at the center of your strategy, your company is highlighting aspects that are important not only to your customers, but to employees, business partners, and society.
A people-centric approach should start with understanding their journey and needs to list the key steps to address the bottlenecks of this contact with your brand.
"Trends and technologies do not exist in isolation. They build and reinforce each other to create the digital world." - Gatner
It is worth noting that the technology trends cited here, are not isolated phenomena, they are linked in a dependent or consequential way. For example, hyper automation is only possible with advances in AI in the form of Learning Machine.
So, which technological trend you found the most interesting?
