IDC Prediction: Four overarching conclusions on the impact on business and everyday lives

IDC just announced its worldwide information technology (IT) industry predictions for 2017 and beyond. The analysts predict digital transformation will attain macroeconomic scale over the next three to four years, changing the way enterprises operate and reshaping the global economy — ushering in what it calls the era of the "DX Economy." Global business is at an inflection point where it must undertake the transition to the digital economy in all aspects of its organization, not only in pilot projects, initiatives or isolated business units. You can read the IDC predictions here, but I would like to draw four overarching conclusions on the impact on business and everyday lives:

First of all, businesses will become more data driven – through Internet of Things (IoT), and supported by artificial intelligence capabilities that enable a new category of data analytics. Smart data analytics provide huge potential to optimize and to accelerate business processes, to individualize products and services and to predict customer needs. All businesses, whether they like it or not, will need to become data driven to compete. If they chose to ignore data analytics they will not survive. Every business will be a digital business with data at its core. For industries that still focus on physical products, such as automotive or real estate, this will mean a huge shift from product centered business to a service provider model. You can literally observe how the automotive industry is currently being disrupted by new mobility concepts like driving services (e.g. Uber) or car sharing that shift customer touch points from manufacturers to the platform providers. People are starting to look at what mobility really means. It is a form of transport in an environment in which people want to travel, as opposed to the ownership per se of a physical asset in the form of the vehicle. The car manufacturers are trying to work out how they will be relevant in the future and where their vehicle volumes will come from. They are entering into some of these arrangements now to enable them to have a stake in the future. This service based mobility concept requires from customers permanent connectivity to be able to make use of these services. Frankly spoken, everything and everyone will be interconnected. IDC calls this the Fourth Platform, when the first Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks of the next era will start to emerge as specialists in integrating the known leading technologies with human bio systems. We are currently moving across from the machine-to-machine (M2M) world to an IoT world, where connected sensors are being put together for services, to an internet of everything world where it is the people, process, data and things to encompass all interaction. But most of these devices won’t be consumer devices, they’ll be used in business – and mostly in healthcare to increase efficiency and effect patient outcomes as well as in manufacturing where they’ll be used to help manage the global supply chain. Today, in fact, computers smaller than a grain of sand can be injected into the body to diagnose disease or they can be sprayed on soil to measure chemical composition. The final conclusion is, that business will become more human centric: The customer experience will be individualized to the batch size one and business processes will be optimized to best suit the needs of each single customer and the skills of each single employee. This, after all, is a vision I personally look forward to.