7 business and technology trends to look out for in 2020

Over the past decade, buzzwords like “disruption” and “blockchain” were all the hype, along with some curiosity and confusion around the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The big question for businesses moving into 2020 is how to start leveraging these disruptive technology and business trends.

There are clear indicators that trends like automation, cloud strategies and leveraging data will continue to be utilised by organisations throughout the coming decade. These and a few others make up the 7 business and technology trends to look out for in 2020:

1. Data-driven decision making

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is the process of making organisational decisions based on actual data rather than intuition or observation alone. Organisations will better leverage historic data, operational data, and usage data to guide strategic decisions. However, having vast amounts of data at your disposal is not the advantage, but rather how it’s being leveraged. Data is only as valuable as the insights you can draw from it, and with all the information that’s floating about, it’s easy to find yourself being led astray. Businesses that will truly benefit from DDDM are the ones who have effective data strategies in place, target data according to business objectives, and turn insights into action.

2. Automation for elevated job functions

Automation has been widely discussed over the last decade. Moving forward, automation will be introduced into large organisations to eliminate menial work. This won’t necessarily lead to job losses, but the aim would rather be to free up employees to perform more meaningful tasks, such as improving customer experience and offering tactical decision making in operational work. Organisations leveraging automation will significantly reduce time spent on manual, repetitive work and cut down on human error.

3. An increase in instant apps and progressive web apps (PWAs)

More people than ever before are online and the ways they’re accessing the web are ever-changing. Mobile usage is surpassing desktop and the trend will only continue, as more people around the globe primarily use mobile devices to access the internet through mobile websites and apps. That being said, the need for bulky mobile applications will diminish, and organisations will opt for leaner, cheaper and more versatile instant applications and web applications that look and feel like native apps in the coming years. In future, fully fledged mobile app offerings will mainly be for flagship products where there can be no compromise on user experience.

4. Cloud adoption and utilisation

Although there has been mass adoption of cloud technologies over the last few years, it has mainly been centred around replicating on-premises bare metal architectures on the cloud. Organisations will now better harness the services and solutions available on cloud for improved delivery, reliability, scale, and cost. Altogether, cloud services offer unparalleled potential for improving business performance and increasing profits. Cloud technologies alleviate complex processes for getting software in the hands of customers, allow for rapid development and testing of hypothesis, and provide more reliability in serving products and services.

5. Digital twins and simulating the business

Organisations will realise the opportunity in modelling their business digitally and utilising data to adjust operations on an almost real-time basis. This will allow businesses to improve ongoing processes, train employees, and test new products or services before launching them to the real world, where it becomes more expensive and complicated to fix issues.

6. Microservices and micro apps

Similar to microservices, micro apps provide highly focused, task-based functionality that let users get in, interact, and get out with maximum efficiency. Both microservices and micro apps are meant to be lightweight, and the concepts hold great importance for enterprise mobility strategies. As we’re moving more and more towards the world of “micro”, organisations will embrace building focused, lean, and well-defined applications over large scale applications that do too much. This allows for validating assumptions and business models with quicker feedback loops.

7. Growing stronger teams through collaboration

The final business trend worth addressing is that of breaking down silos through collaboration. Organisations will begin to place more emphasis on growing stronger teams versus stronger individuals. Instead of business units working independently, teams with different goals but the same vision will start working more tightly together. These stronger, more agile teams will break out of the traditional ways of work to a more collaborative, lean and aligned way of work.

2020 is filled with great business opportunity and challenges for organisations to become more efficient, elevate their customer experience, and offer effective products and services. This will be accomplished by leveraging technology, critical evaluation of strategic goals, and evolving working culture for a new age. These seven trends are guiding principles that can help make this a reality.