International. Gartner unveiled the top strategic technology trends that organizations should explore in 2022. The analysts presented their findings during the Gartner/Xpo Americas IT Symposium, which will be held virtually through Thursday.
"With CEOs and boards striving to find growth through direct digital connections with customers, CIOs' priorities must reflect the same business imperatives, which are found in each of Gartner's top strategic technology trends for 2022," said David Groombridge, research vice president at Gartner.
"CIOs must find the IT force multipliers to enable growth and innovation, and create scalable and resilient technical foundations whose scalability will free up cash for digital investments. These imperatives form the three themes of this year's trends: confidence in engineering, sculpting change, and accelerating growth."
The main strategic technology trends for 2022
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)
One of the most visible and powerful AI techniques coming to market is generative AI: machine learning methods that learn about content or objects from their data and use them to generate realistic, completely new, and completely original artifacts.
Generative AI can be used for a variety of activities, such as creating software code, facilitating drug development, and targeted marketing, but it can also be used for scams, frauds, political disinformation, counterfeit identities, and more. By 2025, Gartner expects generative AI to account for 10% of all data produced, up from less than 1% today.
Data fabric
The number of data silos and applications has increased over the past decade, while the number of skilled personnel on data and analytics (D&A) teams has remained constant or even decreased. Data fabrics, a flexible and resilient integration of data between platforms and business users, have emerged to simplify an organization's data integration infrastructure and create a scalable architecture that reduces the technical debt seen in most D&A teams due to increasing integration challenges.
The real value of a data structure is its ability to dynamically improve data usage with its built-in analytics, reducing data management efforts by up to 70% and accelerating time to value.
Distributed companies
With the rise of hybrid and remote work patterns, traditional office-centric organizations are evolving into distributed enterprises comprised of geographically dispersed workers.
"This requires CIOs to make major technical and service changes to deliver frictionless work experiences, but there's another side to this coin: the impact on business models," Groombridge said. "For every organization, from retail to education, its delivery model must be reconfigured to embrace distributed services. The world didn't think clothes would be tried on in a digital dressing room two years ago."
Gartner expects that by 2023, 75% of organizations that exploit distributed enterprise profits will realize revenue growth 25% faster than competitors.
Cloud Native Platforms (CNPs)
To truly deliver digital capabilities anywhere and everywhere, businesses need to move away from "lift and change" family migrations and opt for NPCs. CNPs use the core capabilities of cloud computing to provide scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities "as a service" to technology creators using Internet technologies, providing faster time to value and reduced costs.
For this reason, Gartner predicts that cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025, up from less than 40% in 2021.
Autonomous systems
As businesses grow, traditional programming or simple automation won't scale. Autonomous systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn from their environments. Unlike automated or even autonomous systems, autonomous systems can dynamically modify their own algorithms without an external software update, allowing them to quickly adapt to new conditions in the field, just like humans.
"Autonomous behavior has already become known through recent implementations in complex security environments, but in the long run, it will become common in physical systems such as robots, drones, manufacturing machines and smart spaces," Groombridge said.
Decision Intelligence (ID)
An organization's decision-making competence can be a major source of competitive advantage, but it is becoming more demanding.
Decision intelligence is a practical discipline that is used to improve decision-making by explicitly understanding and designing how decisions are made and how outcomes are evaluated, managed and improved through feedback. Gartner predicts that in the next two years, one-third of large organizations will use decision intelligence for structured decision-making, to improve competitive advantage.
Composable applications
In the ever-changing business context, the demand for enterprise adaptability steers organizations toward a technology architecture that supports fast, secure, and efficient application changes. Composable application architecture powers such adaptability, and those that have taken a composable approach will outperform the competition by 80% in the speed of implementing new features.
"In turbulent times, integrable business principles help organizations master the accelerated change that is essential for resilience and business growth. Without it, modern organizations risk losing market momentum and customer loyalty," Groombridge said.
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation enables accelerated business growth and resiliency by quickly identifying, examining, and automating as many processes as possible.
"Gartner research shows that high-performing hyperautomation teams focus on three key priorities: improving the quality of work, accelerating business processes, and improving decision-making agility," Groombridge said. "Enterprise technologists also supported an average of 4.2 automation initiatives in the past year."
Computing to Improve Privacy (PEC)
In addition to dealing with the maturation of international privacy and data protection legislation, CIOs must avoid any loss of customer trust as a result of privacy incidents. Therefore, Gartner expects 60% of large organizations to use one or more privacy-enhancing computing techniques by 2025.
PEC techniques, which protect personal and sensitive information at the level of data, software or hardware, share, aggregate and analyze data securely without compromising confidentiality or privacy. Today's use cases exist in many verticals, as well as with public cloud infrastructures (e.g., trusted execution environments).
Cybersecurity mesh
"Data is grouped along many of this year's trends, but it's only useful if companies can trust it," Groombridge said. "Today, assets and users can be anywhere, which means the traditional security perimeter is gone. This requires a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA)."
CSMA helps provide an integrated security structure and posture to protect all assets, regardless of their location. By 2024, organizations that adopt a CSMA to integrate security tools to function as a cooperative ecosystem will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.
AI Engineering
IT leaders struggle to integrate AI into applications, waste time and money on AI projects that are never put into production, or struggle to retain the value of AI solutions once launched. AI engineering is an integrated approach to putting AI models into operation.
"For fusion teams working in AI, the real differentiator for their organizations will lie in their ability to continuously improve value through rapid AI changes," Groombridge said. "By 2025, 10% of companies that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than 90% of companies that don't."
Total Experience (TX)
TX is a business strategy that combines the disciplines of customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user experience (UX) and multi-experience (MX). TX's goal is to drive greater trust, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy for customers and employees. Organizations will increase revenue and profits by achieving adaptable and resilient TX business outcomes.
This year's major strategic technology trends highlight those trends that will generate significant disruptions and opportunities over the next five to 10 years. Gartner customers can read more in "Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022." Learn more about this year's trends in Gartner's partner eBook.
Source: Gartner.
