10 Emerging IT Trends That Will Drive Digital Business in 2022
Cloud-based solutions have been one of the biggest enablers of businesses in the past two years. 2022 will be a year to look for more IT trends that will enable organizations to thrive in the post-pandemic world. In this blog, we explore some of the emerging IT industry trends that will drive digital business in the next few years.
IT Industry Trends That Will Drive Digital Business
Connected Enterprise
In the hybrid-digital era, employees across organizations demand a streamlined workplace experience. For instance, your finance teams need instant access to up-to-date project time data to accelerate client billing. However, traditional time tracking solutions don’t support tight integration and seamless data flow. Forward-thinking businesses are increasingly adopting AI-enabled, modern, intuitive, cloud-based time-tracking solutions to deliver more personalized, user-friendly, and meaningful experiences to their employees.
A digitally connected enterprise focuses on integrating the entire tech ecosystem and establishing seamless sharing of business data. More importantly, it becomes critical to embrace new technologies and modernize existing models that can foster enriching knowledge sharing and collaboration among employees. Forward-thinking business leaders have already started paying attention to creating a connected employee experience by embracing intelligent workforce management and collaboration solutions. It paves the way for improved operational efficiency and reduced operating costs while enabling business leaders with data-driven insights for robust decision-making.
Digital Experience
It is no surprise that organizations nowadays are keen to ensure an excellent digital experience for their employees, customers, and partners. Therefore, every decision-maker is currently focusing on how to further enrich the digital experience of all stakeholders across the touchpoints. Once an organization has ensured an excellent and enriching experience to users, it helps them meet and exceed their expectations quite efficiently.
Thus, it becomes quite mandatory for every digital enterprise to move from legacy point solutions to future-ready cloud-based platforms. Cloud-based platforms allow organizations to build new application architectures while leveraging the true potential of the cloud. Cloud-native platforms not only enable businesses to build new application architectures that are completely resilient, elastic, and agile but also help them respond adeptly to the evolving digital business landscape. Furthermore, it paves the way for an excellent digital experience for all stakeholders, which means greater satisfaction, confidence, loyalty, and advocacy.
Intelligent Project Time Tracking
Time tracking has always been among the top priorities for organizations worldwide to gain a clear understanding of how their resources are spending their billable time. Intelligent time tracking tools and AI-enabled timesheets have helped organizations reconstruct every minute of work very accurately. Intuitive project time tracking tools and AI-enabled timesheets enable organizations to ensure accurate project costing and billing. An intelligent time tracking software comes with a configurable timesheet that can be easily customized with validation rules based on your business-specific requirements.
AI-enabled timesheets help organizations capture billable time more accurately, helping organizations reduce revenue leakages. It allows employees to submit or update time entries from anywhere, through any device. It paves the way for faster decisions, increased efficiency, and improved profits by capturing time-related data from different tools and systems. AI-enabled timesheets provide organizations with a single source of truth for time-related data. More importantly, such timesheets also empower decision-makers with comprehensive insights for better forecasting.
Touchless Time Tracking
The advent of COVID-19 has forced businesses worldwide to undergo a fundamental transformation. Various peculiar day-to-day office activities have been digitized to keep the business up and running. For instance, workers in organizations no longer punch in and punch out their time physically nor do they record attendance through biometric machines. On one hand, the rise in the volume of the remote workforce has compelled businesses to transform their workforce attendance tracking mechanism into a digital model. On the other hand, even with multiple organizations resuming their operations from office premises, there are concerns about employees touching the attendance tracking machines physically.
Cloud-based touchless time tracking solutions can be quite helpful for organizations in the current scenario. Such time tracking software is equipped with cutting-edge capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and voice command to help field employees and mobile workforce punch in their time conveniently. This helps organizations track attendance, project time, and costs efficiently.
Cybersecurity
Although cybersecurity has been a major concern for businesses worldwide, the rise of digital transformation has compelled organizations to revisit their cybersecurity strategies. We have witnessed an exponential rise in the volume of data in recent years, and the data is now stored and processed across distributed IT environments through multiple tools and software. We are witnessing the increasing usage of distinct tools and software across enterprises. This makes your sensitive business data more vulnerable. Therefore, you need to identify and eliminate every sort of security threat in the most efficient manner.
For instance, a minor glitch in your attendance tracking software can hamper the entire payroll system. That’s why decision-makers must focus on reinforcing their cybersecurity framework. Additionally, it also becomes critical to choose vendors based on how secure their solutions are. A secure software or tool leverages modern cybersecurity architecture that allows every digital enterprise to deploy and extend security controls across their premises, data centers, and cloud environments. This enables you to attain a higher degree of agility, scalability, and flexibility.
Global Hiring and Compliance
Organizations across the globe are inclined towards global/remote/region-agnostic hiring strategies to expand across global markets and realms. This highlights the significance of global hiring solutions, which can ensure robust compliance with state and federal regulatory guidelines. More importantly, software and tools must also help organizations track resource utilization and productivity comprehensively to meet the mandatory state-specific payroll rules, regional minimum wage laws, etc.
Currently, there are various enterprise-grade hiring and compliance solutions available in the market that leverage the power of cutting-edge technologies to help you maintain robust compliance with regulatory frameworks. These hiring and compliance solutions help decision-makers align their hiring strategies with international as well as regional guidelines while ensuring impeccable data privacy. Once you have crafted an efficient global hiring and compliance strategy, it becomes quite an easy task to handle candidate data responsibly. A global hiring and compliance solution allows you to narrow down on state-specific legislative aspects for data retention and privacy requirements. More importantly, it helps you reach a broader talent base to meet your organizational objectives.
AI Engineering
AI engineering is an emerging discipline that focuses on developing competent tools and processes that can help AI-powered applications in real-world contexts. As organizations across the world are showing immense interest in leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, it has highlighted the significance of a framework that can guide the development and deployment of AI capabilities.
AI engineering can help organizations streamline their AI delivery by automating the updates to data, models, and applications. It is also empowered with strong AI governance that can help organizations respond more efficiently to the rising demands of AI, and manage robust compliance with the regulatory guidelines.
Generative AI
Generative AI technology is used to create new values by utilizing existing data. Generative AI has the ability to create new content based on the available data sets and information. Generative AI programs enable computers to detect underlying patterns related to data inputs. This can be further used to generate new content, such as digital image processing, audio synthesis, etc.
Organizations across verticals are keen to leverage the power of generative AI specifically because it is based on the concept of unsupervised learning. Generative AI leverages AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to create new content from original datasets.
Autonomic Systems
In the ever-evolving landscape, it has become quite important for physical or software systems to learn from the environment on their own and respond accordingly. Herein, autonomic systems become quite useful as they are self-managed to modify their algorithms dynamically in real-time, based on inputs from the environment they are in.
An autonomic system is one of the top emerging IT trends. It not only optimizes its behavior but also creates an agile set of technology capabilities. Such a system allows organizations to address new requirements and situations and optimize performance in a competent manner. More importantly, such an autonomic system also defends itself from any sort of security threats without human intervention.
Privacy-enhancing Technologies
Privacy-enhancing technologies focus on fundamental data protection principles, allowing users to protect their data in an untrusted environment. As privacy and data protection laws keep on evolving across geographies quite regularly, it becomes quite critical for organizations to embrace privacy protection technologies.
Such technology allows users to extract values from sensitive business data while allowing them to meet statutory compliance requirements and regulatory guidelines. By leveraging these privacy protection computation technologies, organizations can efficiently minimize personal data use and maximize data security in the most competent manner. It uses the techniques to minimize personal data use while allowing individuals to leverage every functionality of the database.
How Can Strategic Technology Trends Help Businesses?
Every organization is on the quest to enhance its digital capabilities. In the technologically advanced business world, it has become mandatory for every organization to adopt the latest technologies to interact with customers or employees and grow simultaneously. According to the Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels. It clearly means that CXOs want their teams to be more capable – leveraging the power of digital technologies – to stay ahead of the competition.
New trends in the engineering and IT sector thus help organizations draft a promising future roadmap. It enables decision-makers to envision and execute their organizational planning and digital transformation journey in the most success-driven manner. Investment in appropriate, cutting-edge technologies will not only help enterprises accomplish their business objectives in a timely manner but will also allow them to maintain a decent growth trajectory.
There are various aspects in which emerging technologies can benefit organizations extensively, but these can be broadly categorized into three major domains discussed here.
Enhance Security
This is the most critical aspect for any organization, especially in the digital era. With the rise in digital crimes in recent years, it has become more critical than ever to pay due attention to this aspect. Organizations need to ensure that their security framework is robust, which can deal efficiently with any sort of cyberattack.
As more businesses have started to move to the cloud and embrace digital transformation, decision-makers need to reassess the security posture of their organizations. There are various technologies that can help organizations become more secure and resilient. These technologies ensure an efficient IT foundation that can protect sensitive business data across cloud and non-cloud environments.
Accelerate Digitalization
No matter how technologically capable an organization is, decision-makers across realms are trying hard to optimize their digital capabilities regularly. On the other hand, for an organization that is yet to embark on its digital journey, it is important to choose the right set of digital technologies that can ensure result-oriented digital transformation.
In this context, it is equally important for every organization – irrespective of its technology adoption phase – to embrace cutting-edge technologies that can help them accelerate their digital transformation journey. These technologies can help every digital enterprise in responding adeptly to the increasing pace of change and make smarter decisions.
Maximize Value Creation
In the digital era, organizations must focus on improving the digital experience of their customers and employees simultaneously. It is no surprise that customers nowadays demand enhanced experiences and added value, and this can be ensured only through the adoption of effective digital technologies. The right set of technologies and processes can help in maximizing value creation and enhancing digital capabilities.
Decision-makers should know that investment in new trends in the engineering and IT sector can help them win business and market share capably. There are various emerging digital technologies that help organizations optimize their processes and transformation initiatives to achieve better agility and flexibility while delivering an excellent digital experience to customers.
From the above discussion, it is quite clear that emerging technologies and IT trends will continue to drive digital business.
Keep a Close Eye on the Emerging IT Trends to Survive and Thrive
Strategic IT trends and cutting-edge technologies are driving digital business. Hence, it has become quite critical for every decision-maker to keep a close eye on all the emerging trends to stay competitive and relevant in the highly volatile digital landscape. Embracing these strategic technology trends can help every digital enterprise survive and thrive efficiently.
