Reducing costs through IT optimization, scaling networks to deliver business value and growth, and reorienting the business itself are among Gartner’s top 10 technology trends for 2023.
There is growing uncertainty about how to navigate the recent challenges stemming from supply chain issues, wars in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, difficulty finding talent, and the evolving financial crisis. To overcome them, some companies cut costs, some continue with existing expansion plans, and some completely change the direction of their business strategy.
Gartner has predicted 10 strategic technology trends for 2023 that will help businesses gain insight into current economic and market challenges, with three central themes: optimizing, scaling, and pioneering.
Vertically scale the industry cloud platform
To scale their business, organizations are adopting vertical market clouds. Vertical market clouds are increasingly offered with industry-specific datasets by various vendors in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, supply chains, agriculture, and finance. According to Padraig Byrne, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, companies these days are focused on extracting business value from their cloud technology, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
“What we have seen is the rise of industry-specific modular components dedicated to specific industry segments, allowing companies to differentiate themselves without fully developing the underlying technology. We can build products quickly,” Byrne says.
Reduce friction between development teams and complex infrastructure
Once the cloud environment is ready, it becomes imperative to bring the product to market, and increasing distribution requires a focus on platform engineering.
“But we either have complex architectures or use hybrid systems, with some applications on-premises and some in the cloud. There’s also the skills shortage of ignorant developers,” Byrne says.
The solution is to focus on the difference between where the development team is located and the infrastructure tier to reduce the friction between the two.
This can be achieved by building an engineering platform with reusable components for developers with tools such as integrated development environments (IDEs), monitoring tools, and CI/CD. All of this is provided through a self-service development portal. These are pre-approved tools, so developers can access them when they need them rather than asking for approval to use this or that tool.
Scale anywhere with Wi-Fi
Wireless trends are based on Gartner’s prediction that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will use 5 or more wireless technologies. This especially means additional use of office Wi-Fi.
As Byrne noted, consumers are already using up to three wireless technologies every day.
But wireless networks are more than just individual tools. Western Australian mining company Albermale has created a private 5G network that allows scientists and engineers to remotely access systems when needed without being on site.
“What this means is that the network is not just a cost to your business, it can actually add value and differentiation to your work if you think about it another way,” Byrne said. say.
Create a digital immune system
According to Gartner, 76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for generating revenue. Traditional approaches to software development make it difficult to create scalable, secure, and stable systems, hindering revenue-generating opportunities.
This is where the concept of digital immunity for research firms comes into play. It brings together multiple modern practices around the application development lifecycle, such as observability to improve what your organization can see and improve application resilience using site reliability engineering and chaos engineering. It’s for said Byrne. “We are combining analytics and AI to improve testing of these tools, supplying end-to-end security across the entire chain. And what this offers is more resilient applications, It helps avoid outages,” he said.
Gartner predicts that businesses will be able to reduce downtime by up to 80% by adopting some of these technologies, which will translate into revenue.
Applying observability for better operations
The concept of applied observability is not new, but it makes sense in the context of optimization and is closely related to practices related to digital immunity. Byrne collects data from decisions made, then collects data about the context in which decisions were made, and applies analytics to that context to make more business value-based decisions. ‘s feedback explained to create his loop.
AI trust, risk and security management
AI TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management), in a nutshell, makes AI trustworthy. Among the most experienced companies, Gartner says only 50% of his AI models have reached production, and the reasons behind that are lack of trust in data, and security and privacy concerns. I discovered that
First, to improve AI adoption, organizations must be able to explain why computers are making decisions. This is accompanied by modelops, a Gartner term that stands for governance and lifecycle management of a wide range of operational AI and decision-making models, including machine learning, knowledge graphs, rules, optimization, language models, and agent-based models. . According to Gartner, models can get into production faster and with less friction as a result of using Modelops.
Then there is the use of advanced techniques such as adversarial AI, which are used to generate one model and train another. Finally, we need ethical guidelines and strong data protection.
“All of this means that these models are more reliable and therefore more likely to be put into production in development work,” says Byrne.
Start creating super apps
Gartner suggests that by building super apps, companies can open up new ways to engage customers. According to Byrne, superapps combine some of the functionality of regular apps with attributes of app platforms and ecosystems. Super apps not only have their own differentiated functionality, but also the ability to share a common data model between core apps and third-party software to build third-party applications.
Byrne said moving to this early will give businesses an advantage, and he sees opportunities in finance and health, among other industries.
Adaptive AI for organizational change
Once the issues of trust, production, and generation of personalized analytics are taken care of, companies can use real-time feedback and adaptive learning algorithms to gain business acumen and adapt to changing environments. You can dive into AI.
This will allow companies to create and access new data to test in these environments, allowing them to personalize the output of their algorithms for their users in a continuous manner that provides them with a dedicated and individualized offering. I can. “This is adaptive AI, a very different way of thinking about traditional AI,” Byrne said.
For those skeptical of the metaverse, Byrne said the metaverse is made up of different technologies and is related to business issues such as lack of trust in data and how to improve customer service. rice field. One way he uses it is to improve customer deliveries via avatars and chatbots. Other methods include using gamification for training and augmented reality for shopping experiences. Gartner found that 51% of him in Gen Z expects some form of augmented reality within the next two years.
Technology plays a role in sustainability
Gartner’s Top Trends conclude with Sustainability and the Role of IT. Byrne warns not only about the environment and climate change, but also about the people behind the business, the social aspects of the organization, improving work culture, employee diversity, improving equity and inclusion, and improving training. I’m here.
However, when it comes to environmental sustainability, technology has a particularly important role to play, especially when it comes to solutions for energy reduction in IT services and the use of renewable energy analysis and traceability. With these in mind, companies can define what is applicable to their business and work on their roadmap.
“Then you realize you don’t have to create your own roadmap and deliver all of these technologies at once. You can create an organization-centric action plan,” says Byrne.