Digital Disruption in 2018 and beyond

We have entered a decade of digital disruption of large corporate business models, driven by a step change in the power of technology and the audacity and speed of start-ups.

To be fit for the future, visionary companies will deliberately re-imagine themselves by injecting or attacking established models with new ideas fueled by technology.

There’s no doubt that cloud and edge computing1 are the enabler technologies to put Industry 4.0 into reality today, rather than tomorrow. In 2018 and beyond, the future of automation will be a hybrid system leveraging cloud services for learning and optimization, correlating field data with external information to generate new insights.

Each of these technologies–AI, IoT and the blockchain–would be huge on their own, but the point at which they converge will magnify their effects. Eventually, they will become integrated into the fibers of everything we do – in 2018 and beyond.

AI techniques are evolving rapidly and organizations will need to invest significantly in skills, processes and tools to successfully exploit these techniques and build AI-enhanced systems. Investment areas can include data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation. Multiple constituencies, including data scientists, developers, and business process owners will need to work together.

The expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT)2 3 has added innumerable new sources of Big Data into the Data Management landscape and will be one of the major Big Data Trends in 2018 and beyond. Notebooks, smart phones, sensors on machines, all generate huge amounts of data for the IoT.

Organizations that are flexible enough to manage and transform the data into useful Business Intelligence, this represents a significant opportunity to gain a competitive advantage (or remain competitive). As Big Data grows, businesses attempt to keep up with it, and struggle to turn the data into usable insights. Business Intelligence is key to staying competitive, and Data Analytics provides the up-to-date information needed.

For example Big Data is now being used to drive healthcare solutions, but may also reshape the ways people access their healthcare and how they pay for it. New, wearable technology monitors an individual’s health, allowing hospitals and clinics to improve the quality of healthcare. Patients can have a networked device remind them to take prescriptions, to exercise, and be alerted when blood pressure levels change dramatically.

Organizational decision-making is currently undergoing a shift which will continue into 2018. In 2017, the goal of processing Big Data promoted ever-increasing efficiency and steadily decreasing costs. In turn, this has made the use of Business Intelligence, based on Big Data, more important to small and medium-sized businesses, and even start-ups. This trend will continue into 2018, and beyond, with the cost of processing Big Data continuing to drop. Expect the following:

• Use of Business Intelligence from the Cloud will increase.
• Analytics will provide improved data visualization models and self-service software.
• Decisions regarding expansion into new markets and geographies will be based on Big Data.

Blockchain adoption

Blockchain technology carries the potential to take IoT's ability to help companies target consumers more efficiently to the next level. All systems of interconnected IoT devices can use blockchains to effectively and reliably organize, store and share streams of data. This technology is expected to play an integral role in the multitude of industries that manage real-world objects moving across different geographies, thereby making blockchain one of the top IoT trends in 2018.

Digital transformation

IoT has played a huge rule in driving transformation efforts for businesses, as companies get new insights into their assets and can create new business models based on data and analytics.

David Cearley, distinguished analyst at Gartner said: “The intelligent digital mesh is a foundation for future digital business and ecosystems. IT leaders must factor these technology trends into their innovation strategies or risk losing ground to those that do.”

" Digital disruption will change the way we work based on access and speed to information companies did not have before."

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1 Edge computing is a method of optimizing cloud computing systems by performing data processing at the edge of the network, near the source of the data. This reduces the communications bandwidth needed between sensors and the central datacenter by performing analytics and knowledge generation at or near the source of the data. This approach requires leveraging resources that may not be continuously connected to a network such as laptops, smartphones, tablets and sensors. Source: Wikipedia

2 Gartner estimates more than 8.4 billion "Things" (IoT) are on the internet today, up more than 30% from just one year ago (2017).

3 IoT Trends 2018: Artificial Intelligence, Security and Edge Solutions