Technology Trends for 2020 and Beyond

There is a paradigm shift across every industry where companies are putting their bets on technology as a strategic driver of digital transformation initiatives and competitive advantage instead of IT being a backoffice function.

The command and control IT operations approach does not deliver outcomes in the digital age. For that reason many corporations are including CIOs, CTOs and technologists in corporate strategy as key contributors to enable and develop new solutions and services enabled by disruptive technology.

With this trend in mind and with increasingly high expectations by customers, consumers and partners for tailored, intuitive and engaging experiences companies are mapping out how technology can play a key role in their clients journey to purchase services and products and how to add key differentiating features to their offerings.

Here is a short list of key trends that enable transformation iniatives, deliver new insights and opportunities for customer experience, tailored solutions and technology enabled services in 2020 and beyond:

1. Quantum Computing enabled applications 

Evend though quantum computing is in its early stages solutions are starting to materialize to take advantage of the non-linear compute capability to detect correlations in data and put existing capabiilty like cryptography upside down in its head.

The global enterprise quantum-computing market is expected to reach $5.85 billion by 2025, up from $650 million in 2017, according to Allied Market Research.

By 2023, 20% of organizations, including businesses and governments, are expected to budget for quantum-computing projects, up from less than 1% in 2018, according to Gartner.

Companies like DWave are allowing to rent out quantum computing for experimental data exploration

Breakthrough in genomic sequencing and to develop new personalize treatment plans for patients are just the beginning of possible future scenarios empowered by quantum computing: Potential Cure for Cancer?

2. Human 2.0 augmentation - blurring the line between technology and biology

As Laid out in my previous article Augmented experiences enabled by blockchain and AI:

Augmented humanity offers many opportunities such as:

• Enabling new business models: catering to the strengths of real time analytics and variety of data stored in big data clusters, storing pre processed data that has been analyzed through deep learning methods, continuously updated by new data that is fed to the system and focused on user and company benefits including efficiencies, tailored experiences and decision support in the context of "Now"
• Compliance: Driving greater awareness and compliance of operational guardrails of the business so that regulatory policies, procedures and best practices are followed
• Immutability: Protecting the customer experience interacting with IoT and AI enabled devices and personal assistants through an immutable profile to drive trusted commerce with audit trails for improving quality, accuracy and confidence
• Trust: Enabled by digital identity management enforced through distinct distributed ledger profiles reducing risk, driving a tailored customer-focused experience and securing the system of connected machines, blockchain participants and enterprises with evidence of tampering and data breach notification
• Veracity: The underlying data is independently verifiable through blockchain technology identifying customers, auditors and regulators further reducing compliance effort and costs

3. Data is the new oil and insight is the new currency

Data enables the transition from global one for all solutions to personally tailored all for one solutions.

Many organizations are becoming data driven organizations where data provides input how to improve processes, how to map out new solutions based on data and all the way to becoming data brokers and selling data to other organizations.

In this previous article I laid out options on how companies are leveraging data to become data driven organizations.

Data permeates our lives be it in the workplace or at home:

With the advent of connected anythings there is an exponential acceleration of data to be analyzed which in turn creates the need for platforms that can sift through the data and cut out the noise to find that golden nugget of data as input for better products and driving customer satisfaction with existing products.

Data and information enables companies to tailor products and solutions to the individual gathering petabytes of information to better serve their clients needs.

In a previous article Components of a digital consumer insights platform I laid out how digital consumer platform architecture can enable better decision making and tailor contextual experiences in the moment of now.

4. Blockchain Transparency and traceability

Blockchain technology has been around the block for a bit and there are some real world applications of this technology that companies can take advantage of.

In a world of exploding data, sensors, machines, humans and digitized information it is increasingly important to having a medium that can verify the authenticity of data and actors in the digitized economy.

The block chain ledger will play a central part validating and tracing interactions between human and digital trading partners, verifying data authenticity. Companies like @Beasy are working on reducing complexity and making blockchain transactions easy.

Industries already taking advantage of this technology and setting themselves apart from competition. First movers are in the supply chain, consumer products, pharmaceutical and finance industries where the validation of product, services, origin and destination is important to verify that their products have not been tampered with while in transit and partners have the trust that who you claim you are is really you.

I laid out some of the opportunities and challenges leveraging this exciting technology in the hunt for the killer (d)App article

5. Cutting out the middleman continued: Democratization of expertise, investment and financial transactions

Cutting out the middleman through disruptive technologies will have an impact on all industries.

No Code: highly talented developer resources are scarce in the market place especially for high in demand programming languages for data science, machine learning and Internet of Things applications. To bridge that gap companies are providing new low to no code platforms options for businesses: Overview no code platforms

Tokenization: Blockchain technology enables companies to own a percentage of multimillion dollar real estate opening up investment options that were previously not possible without leveraging a trust platform like blockchain combined with smart contracts: Forbes article about a 30 Million dollar real estate property that has been tokenized:

6. The empowered edge, distributed cloud and digital twins

With the rise of connected devices and an explosion access nodes and data more data and transactions need to be processed at the edge, on the connected devices and machines.

Multicloud environments and technology enable companies to place their data and applications close to where it is needed geographically to enable scalability, rapid disaster failover and digital twins for analysis and simulation of real world applications without having to physically deploy them.

By 2020, Gartner predicts that there will be around 20 billion connected sensors and end-points to deliver the data needed to create digital twins of physical equipment and systems.

That in turn enables faster processing times, decisions can be made near realtime and synchronize with the rest of the network at a later stage.

7. Autonomous things, bots and hyperautomation

As laid out in my previous article Smart Bots for a Connected Future bots and autonomous things can interact in symphony with each other and humans further blurring the lines between the digital and physical world.

Frameworks like the one below show what types of services need to be integrated for improved user experiences abstracting the technology and focusing on delivering business outcomes:

Robotic process automation is getting enhanced by machine learning and artificial intelligence enabling automated decisions which can prevent disasters, block cybercriminal intruders and enable further efficiencies.

For instance in supply chain processes a framework like this could enable the automated orchestration of 1. part identification: machine-readable sensors and barcodes to physically identify components, 2. robotic picking: automated robotic forklifts and drones to locate and fetch items, 3. intelligent transportation: autonomous vehicles and transportation conveyors to deliver parts to specific locations, 4. order automation: as components are deplenished, automated orders are raised for new components.

An early yet impressive example of the symphony of technology bots, connected things like digital assistants and speaker systems leveraging machine learning working hand in hand for a conversational AI Bot to book a hair appointment for their human client leveraging Google Duplex:

8. The next generation operating model for a digital world

A customer journey map is a framework that enables you to improve your customer experience. 

As laid out in this McKinsey article customer journeys should be mapped out internally to achieve efficiencies focused on business outcomes and externally to optimize touchpoints and key moments in the customer lifecycle.

Below is a journey map depicting the external customer journey:

The customer journey map documents the customer experience through their perspective, helping you best understand how internal and external customers are interacting with you now and helps you identify areas for improvement moving forward.

McKinsey lays out five approaches to enhance digital capability leveraging technology such as the 2020 trends laid out in this article and process optimization:

Great customer journey maps are rooted in data-driven research, and visually represent the different phases your customers experience based on a variety of dimensions such as sentiment, goals, touch points, and more.

The secret sauce to successful customer engagement platforms is to manage the data and insights seamlessly across department boundaries and cross platform to make informed decisions at the right point in time of customer journey key events.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are my own personal views and don't represent the views of current or previous employers.

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