Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
8 Technology Voids that will be filled in 2022
By Gabriel Engel, CEO and co-founder of
Rocket.Chat
COVID-19, and the rise of the remote workforce
were top of mind for businesses across many industries and sectors in 2021.
Though this trend will likely continue, we will see a reconfiguration in 2022
as the pandemic evolves. Here are my predictions for 2022:
Digital
evolutions in business will be expedited
Hybrid cloud structures will increase the need
to have flexible and modularized tech components, allowing technologies to
serve different needs.
According to the 2020 Digital Workplace
Survey, 64% of folks felt that more funding has been available for digital
workplace initiatives since COVID-19. The same survey cited that 84% of folks
felt that the increase in digital workplace funding will be permanent.
Remote
and hybrid work models will "modernize" the business ecosystem
Employees now expect flexibility and the
ability to work from home. Many companies, whenever possible, are opening up
their roles to talent across the globe, which completely changes the scenario
for employees and companies looking to hire and keep talent.
By 2024, 80% of global enterprises will
include social and community engagement experiences as essential elements.
Video
and voice will become an essential tool for team collaboration
There will be tight integration of messaging
and group collaboration into our daily activities. Enterprise companies will
accelerate their shift from dependency on a single company for their messaging
needs, as real-time collaboration and engagement becomes more of an imperative
in the new work environment.
Privacy
and data protection will remain front and center for 2022 and beyond
According
to IBM's Data Breach 2021 report, data breach costs rose from $3.86
million to $4.24 million, the highest average total cost in the 17-year history
of the report.
Data privacy, security and ownership will
continue to be a macro political-economic variable that will drive individual
and organizational-level decisions. You can expect ongoing sensational
revelations of privacy breaches by major tech companies (Google and
Facebook/Meta, for example) throughout 2022. Per quarter, we expect at least
one massive leak of customer's private data by a large multinational.
Self-storage data is essential to certain
industries, such as government and banking. There's growing awareness of the
risks of a data breach and how our data is potentially exposed by cloud
solutions. Most people still assume cloud is king, but there is an open lane of
opportunity for self-managed solutions with little to no competition,
especially in the customer engagement omnichannel space. Awareness of the risks of data breach and how our
data is potentially exposed by cloud solutions will continue to grow.
Self-managed solutions will become more desirable, as companies look to fully
protect their data privacy possible.
Total
experience will forever alter business models
By 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use
total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class
customer and employee advocacy levels. Total experience (TX) is a business
strategy for creating superior shared customer and employee experiences by
interlinking customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user
experience (UX), and multi experience (MX) disciplines.
The goal of total experience is to drive
customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
Organizations are using digital initiatives to improve customer experience and
employee productivity. You can achieve both these business outcomes by applying
adaptive total experience business strategies to simultaneously increase
revenue and reduce costs.
We'll
see the "beginning of the end" for traditional institutions and organizations
Innovation will continue its disruptive march
across business and technology landscapes. Young companies will move quickly to
harness digital advances, while some established organizations will struggle to
keep pace, burdened with IT systems that increasingly seem slow, rigid, and
expensive.
Conventional Ivy League education systems, for
example, will continue to whither in the new global connected world, giving way
to accessible and scalable approaches to train and educate the global
population. Technologies that allow people to communicate, exchange and
collaborate from wherever they are located will become relevant in the
education arena.
Technologists
and software architecture will be essential for continued innovation
We can expect to see organizations move
architects out of their traditional roles. These technologists will begin
taking more responsibility for services and systems. Once redeployed,
architects can simplify technical stacks and technical agility that gives
competitors a market advantage.
IT will
continue its rapid rise
In this changing world, CEOs' priorities are
clear: they want growth, digitalization and efficiency. Most want to rebuild
the revenue they lost during the pandemic and return to growth, but some need
to build on the momentum they've established.
This means that it will be vital for all IT
leaders responsible for technology innovation to address these three themes:
Accelerating growth, sculpting change and engineering trust.
Conclusion
Remote and hybrid work changes are still in
the very beginning and this should facilitate impacts that we can't even
predict. As we look ahead to 2022, the one thing we can be certain of is that
the unexpected will happen, and we will adapt.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Engel is the CEO and co-founder of
Rocket.Chat, the leading open-source communications platform that allows users
to chat securely on the web, desktop, or mobile and offers the choice of both
Self-Managed and SaaS options. Gabriel founded Rocket.Chat in 2015 and is
passionate about collaboration tools, open-source and new tech. Prior to
Rocket.Chat, Gabriel co-founded Konecty, and worked as Product Manager for
Business Innovation and Mobile Applications at Vodafone Global Enterprise.