Digital Transformation: How IT Revolution will Continue in 2018?
The landscape of Information Technology is constantly evolving. Innovations and technical advancement are revolutionizing companies in their business processes. When we are approaching the end of 2017, let’s decode the news of IT trends in the future year.
Virtualization of information systems
The digital transformation and one of its variants, Cloud computing, have never been more fashionable, and this is just the beginning. For individuals and businesses, storing data and software tools in the Cloud offers many advantages: favoured mobility, free memory space. The Cloud can outsource its data centers.
An impressive growth
Forecasts predict an intensification of the trend. Cisco expects Cloud traffic to triple by 2020. This exponential growth is explained by:
- On the private side: through increased use of streaming videos and social networks. Per-user Cloud storage traffic of 513MB per month in 2015 is expected to reach 1.7GB by 2020.
- Business side: Big Data and IoT (Internet of Things). The data sets harvested and processed are getting bigger and bigger.
Big Data
Big Data is the set of data generated and exchanged around the world. Their sources are diverse and varied: web, videos, images, emails, online shopping, GPS signals… Each of our digital actions generates a trace and information to the key. The data itself is “passive”, according to the expression of the Gartner Institute. It is the algorithm that can read it that transforms it into action.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about extending the Internet to physical things/places. This is a huge field with a succession of product innovations and possible process innovations. IoT Analytics, a leading provider of market insights for the Internet of Things (IoT), M2M, and Industry 4.0, has more than 10,000 IoT projects worldwide, a figure that has increased fivefold in three years. And we are only in the infancy.
Dematerialization enabled by digital transformation
Legal obligations contribute to the growth of the Cloud. In application of a European management, any company must dematerialize its invoicing by 2020. The stake is at the same time economic, to fluidify the economic circuit, and ecological, with an environmental dimension. At the corporate level, these are important productivity gains, which they can even extend to their entire management: by dematerializing pay slips, expense reports, and so on.
Business intelligence: towards more performance
- Better driving
The ability to process large data sets offers businesses real strengths. What amounted to a visual piloting, or arbitrary or instinctive decisions, can now rely on a more in-depth analysis. BI (Business Intelligence) offers relevant dashboards for strategic management of the activity.
- The “learning” effect
Machine Learning adds finesse to the analytical capabilities of programs. They make their own reconciliations, observe trends, and derive simulations and future estimates. For fields of analysis as vast as random, the relevance of the results obtained is without equal.
- Digital automation
The eradication of tasks without added value in the day-to-day operation of your company is facilitated. By setting thresholds and given actions, you tell the program what to do. And this one ensures continuously thereafter. In marketing, this is what allows you to build adapted scenarios as part of your lead generation strategies.
- The user-centered approach
Big Data technologies have radically changed marketing approaches. We are now able to collect a lot of information on the consumer, which allows bettering adjusting its offer, to target its proposal. Mass marketing is over. The campaigns will be more targeted and personalized.
More agile organizations
- Go up the field information
With IoT, many actors took the opportunity to improve their internal processes. Connected objects are an opportunity to give voice to the field actors, to recover data and promote exchanges. The businesses, service companies and industrial manufacturing are the first sectors to have deployed. For others, such as pharmaceuticals or oil and gas suppliers, the regulatory framework sometimes prevents their adoption.
- More horizontality
Pyramid hierarchical structures are also destined to evolve. The trend is transversality: we break the silos and flatten the links of subordination. The project mode becomes common, and each employee gains autonomy with a greater margin of responsibility and involvement.
- New areas of expertise
The trades, too, evolve. The 3,700 jobs involved in Big Data will increase to 8,800 by 2018. New job profiles appear: Chief Data Officer (CDO), UX (User Experience) designer, developers … Data analysis requires a set of complementary skills. For the HR (Human Resources) policy, the challenge is to understand these IT jobs in order to identify talents capable of meeting the new needs of the company.
By 2025, there are an estimated 2 billion connected users, implying a set of socio-economic changes taking place at all levels. For companies, 2018 promises to be one step closer to the digital transition.
