Digital, People and Data are likely to dominate in 2018: Virtusa CIO Madu Ratnayake

Digital 2.0, People 2.0 and Data 2.0 are some of the key technology trends that are likely to dominate the discussions in 2018 predict Madu Ratnayake, CIO & Head - Business Process Excellence, Virtusa Corp

By Madu Ratnayake, CIO & Head - Business Process Excellence, Virtusa Corp

In 2017 we witnessed a number of emerging technologies getting an early entrance to enterprises. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones, robotics, virtual reality/augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics process automation (RPA), cloud and blockchainare some of the disruptive technologies that emerged and became the hot topic of discussion at almost every organization worldwide.

As we move into the new year, we envisage that these emerging technologies will start to make a transformational impact in forward-looking organizations worldwide.

Here are some key technology trends that are likely to dominate the discussions in 2018.

1. Digital 2.0: We will witness the next generation of digital transformation as companies adopt a platform strategy to go digital. Over the last five years, we witnessed the first weave of digital, where organizations embraced Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) technologies to improve business efficiency and to improve customer experience. Most companies embraced a mobile strategy, introduced multi-channel customer engagement programs, optimized business processes with robotics process automation and experimented with some form of machine learning to optimize business operations. Most of these technologies offered incremental benefits, while the true promise of technology transformation remains to be seen.

While the platform companies, such as Uber, Airbnb, Apple and Google continued to disrupt established companies, no major technology lead transformation of established organizations was apparent up until now. As platform business model is getting more understood and early such transformation in established enterprises become well known, we believe that more organizations will embrace the platform revolution to truly become digital companies. We believe more companies will embrace their true digital avatar and start to become a true digital platform business in the coming year.

2. People 2.0: We will witness the transformation of work culture enabled by technology to shift focus from hierarchical systems to a Wirearchy. During the past five years many companies have embraced enterprise social technologies, gamification, crowdsourcing and many collaboration platforms in the hope of better collaboration, accelerated innovation and to reach agile execution speeds. Successes of these technology investments have been somewhat mixed in many organizations. The true emergence of majority of the millennial workforce, leadership experience with technology over the last five years and an increased realization of the mind-set transformation that is needed to truly create a digital work place, will start the People 2.0 weave in 2018. As people learn new work skills such as a working out loud and leaders learn new leadership skills such as social leadership, we will witness the impact of technology investments to transform traditional hierarchical work models to more connected Wirearchy. This will enable companies to truly take advantage of its collective wisdom of the workforce while enabling speed and innovation. HR leaders and the CIO organizations have to work in unison to usher in this People 2.0 transformation.

3. Data 2.0: Data is becoming the new currency for organizations.
Digital 1.0 focus has enabled many organizations to optimize and instrument processes, gather data from new sources such as a mobile and IoT sensors resulting in an explosion of data availability. At the same time, technology for processing, predicting and making meaning out of data has come of age. Technology capabilities such as Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and Cloud computinghave made large complex data processing accessible to many organizations at a fractional cost. Proliferation of data, easy access to processing capabilities coupled with rapid expansion of the talent base in data science and analytics will make 2018 the year of data. We will witness many aspects of a business becoming truly data driven. From business process optimization, predictive analytics for operational decision making and HR analytics will start to become mainstream in 2018.

We believe, 2018 will usher in some exciting transformations across industries. We will see a perfect storm of technology maturity; business model transformation and skills availability making the technology disruption that has been long promised to slowly start to become a reality. This will require significant shift in the way organizations think about technology as a strategic force and the CIOs must be ready to lead the way.