This year, looking ahead makes sense

January has arrived, and with it the season for making predictions about the coming year. The difference is: January this year might really be an appropriate time to look ahead.

Vaccines and a potential break in the COVID-19 pandemic are on the horizon. And from a reporting and predicting standpoint, the past 10 months of pandemic have given business analysts time to examine what has happened so far and draw some realistic conclusions about what could happen next.

One of the best reports of this type we’ve seen is “The next normal arrives: Trends that will define 2021 – and beyond” by the analysts at McKinsey & Company.

The insights and conclusions provided are not the typical January guesses. They are backed by facts and statistics from more than a dozen areas – from retail to travel to supply chain, and from the environment to healthcare to government.

Quite a few of McKinsey’s trends are specific to the technology sector. (And, of course, technology underlies nearly every sector, making its influence fully pervasive.) Consider these:

• The increase in e-commerce in the United States during the first half of 2020 was equivalent to e-commerce growth in the previous ten years
• Telehealth in the future could account for 30 percent of all healthcare visits
• An estimate that more than 20 percent of the global workforce could work remotely most of the time with no loss in productivity

One technology-related conclusion we found particularly interesting is the section, “The crisis sparks a wave of innovation and launches a generation of entrepreneurs.”

The report attributes this wave to a huge growth in digitization: “meaning everything from online customer service to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve operations.”

It seems that COVID was good for one thing: “Disruption creates space for entrepreneurs.”

Many companies have had to scramble during the pandemic, implementing business and technology solutions that still need refining. It will be interesting to see where it all goes.

But we’ll be doing more than watching. Every one of us, including those in our technology marketing world, will be right in the thick of it. Together, we’ll be helping to craft the “next” normal.