To stay ahead, business and technology leaders must deploy disruptive technologies to drive purposeful, transformational change. Below, Daniel Calugar will discuss the Deloitte Insights Tech Trends Report’s nine macro technology forces and how the adoption of these forces will shape the new trends disrupting business.
In 2019, the 10th annual Tech Trends Report explored nine technology forces Deloitte tracked for a decade. These are forces that were predicted to transform businesses. This year’s report takes a fresh look at enterprise adoption of these macro forces and explores how they are shaping the technology trends that are predicted to disrupt companies through 2021.
The nine macro technology forces—digital experience, analytics, cloud, core modernization, risk, the business of technology, digital reality, cognitive technologies, and blockchain—are often described as the backbone of business innovation and transformation.
The technologies of digital experience, analytics, and cloud have evolved from promising innovations and novel approaches into full-fledged trends that are foundational components of IT and corporate strategy. Even while these trends have proven their value, the full potential of these technologies remains mostly untapped.
Digital reality, cognitive technologies, and blockchain are newer trends that are multiplying in importance. VR and AR fundamentally change the way humans interact with their surroundings, with data, and with each other. Cognitive technologies, such as machine learning, hold the promise of profound potential for business and society. Blockchain, the enabler of bitcoin, has risen to define the standard of trust.
Just as technologies evolve from promising innovations to macro technology forces, they are perceived as enablers, foundational, or disruptors as they mature.
The enablers—digital experience, analytics, and cloud—are powering the disruption of businesses, markets, and business models. They continue to evolve at an ever-increasing pace.
Providing a reliable and scalable foundation for innovation is the business of technology, risk, and core modernization. These forces are required for successful investment in disruptive technologies.
Today’s disruptors—digital reality, cognitive technologies, and blockchain—are agents of change for the next decade. No longer considered novel, these newer trends are on the cusp of becoming as familiar and meaningful as their forerunners.
Business and technology leaders can efficiently describe the nine macro technology forces as:
Digital Experience – all the ways organizations, customers, employees, and constituents engage and carry out transactions within a digital environment.
Analytics – using data to generate insights about customers, citizens, markets, operations, and virtually every facet of how an enterprise operates.
Cloud – a means for lifting and shifting infrastructure and workloads to achieve more, faster, and more efficient results.
Core Modernization – the revitalization of core systems to leverage digital, cloud, and other macro forces.
Cyber Risk – the potential of loss or harm related to technical infrastructure or the use of technology within an organization.
The Business of Technology – fundamentally changing how the enterprise identifies, trials, evaluates, and scales new digital technologies to make them business-relevant.
Digital Reality – Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), the Internet of Things (IoT), and immersive/spatial technologies.
Cognitive Technologies – technologies such as machine learning (ML), neural networks, robotic process automation (RPA), bots, natural language processing (NLP), and the broader domain of artificial intelligence (AI).
Blockchain – a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. While these nine macro technology forces are the fuel needed for transformational change, none are sufficient alone. Business leaders must build on the foundational forces and embrace the enabling forces to stay ahead of the inevitable disruption forces heading their way.
Daniel Calugar is an experienced investor with a background in business, law, and computer science. As a tech enthusiast, he became interested in computer science and pursued it before obtaining business and law degrees. Dan developed a passion for finance while working as a pension lawyer. He leveraged his technical skills to build computer programs that would analyze vast amounts of data and explore trading strategies to identify more worthwhile investments.
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