Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Shailesh Kumar Davey, Vice President, ManageEngine
Automation, AI and Data Management Technologies Will Drive Business in 2019
With 2018 coming to a close, it's time to look ahead to the
new year and see what 2019 has in store for us. Based on conversations with
ManageEngine customers and partners as well as observations on IT and business
developments, here are three key tech trends we expect see.
1) Digital process automation will accelerate.
At ManageEngine, we predict that enterprise adoption of process
automation technologies will continue with the same vigor because the technologies
are expected to make the enterprises nimble, data-centric, and quick to make
decisions across geographies. More importantly, process automation will also
help enterprises to go beyond the simple operational and efficiency gains made
with basic automation to tap new revenue opportunities.
For example, a bank embracing fintech can use digital
process automation to improve real-time visibility into its customers' data and
factor the improved view into real-time risk assessment of the customers. To
elucidate further, a bank could provide its customers with digital tools
related to accounting, receivables, payables and all other back office
functions. The customers can give permission to the bank to use selective data
to have good visibility on the velocity of their businesses. This could enable
the bank to provide financial services at a faster clip to the customer and at
lower cost, not only due to automation but also to better risk visibility of
the customer.
2) OCR/NLP/voice/video/image processing will aid
productivity gains.
The main nemesis of process automation is any web form
customers, employees or partners must fill out when an organization wants to
capture their data. Everyone dreads screens with forms.
AI/machine learning technologies are mature enough to
process voice, video, text and images reliably. Using these mature
technologies, the natural activities of making a phone call, taking a video, or
taking a picture could be used to fill out data-enriched forms automatically.
Hence, both objectives will be met - collecting adequate data and filling out
fewer forms - and these technologies will continue their march into the
enterprise.
3) Privacy concerns will hold center stage.
With GDPR becoming a reality and hosts of other countries
passing similar privacy laws, data usage will be closely monitored. Data will
be tagged so that its origin will be known at the point of usage. Tools related
to data tagging and master data management will become crucial. Privacy
concerns and related legal ramifications could slow down decision-making in
enterprises. In response, new generation messaging and audio/video web
conferencing tools will be used by enterprises to achieve the twin objectives
of privacy compliance and rapid decision-making.
##
About the Author
Shailesh
Kumar Davey is vice president, engineering at ManageEngine and a co-founder of its parent company, Zoho Corp. He is currently involved in implementation
of engineering processes across the organization. Before Zoho and ManageEngine,
Davey worked at Tata-IBM on networking related projects. For more
information on ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, please visit www.manageengine.com/; follow the
company blog at https://blogs.manageengine.com/, and on
LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/manageengine-, Facebook at
www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and Twitter @ManageEngine.