Each year, we identifies technology trends that are critical to businesses. This year, the list includes 12 strategic trends that enable CEOs to achieve growth, digitization and efficiency – and to position CIOs and IT leaders as strategic partners in the company.
“CEOs know they need to accelerate digital business adoption and are looking for more direct digital ways to connect with their customers,” said expert. “But they also want to be efficient and protect margins and cash flow in anticipation of future economic risks.” (See below for more information on the strategic value of these trends.)
What are the 12 most important strategic technology trends for 2024 – and why are they so important?
Contents
- 1 Trend 1: Data Fabric
- 2 Trend 2: Cybersecurity Mesh
- 3 Trend 3: Privacy-enhancing computation
- 4 Trend 4: Cloud-native platforms
- 5 Trend 5: Composable applications
- 6 Trend 6: Decision Intelligence
- 7 Trend 7: Hyper-Automation
- 8 Trend 8: AI engineering
- 9 Trend 9: Distributed Enterprises
- 10 Trend 10: Total Experience
- 11 Trend 11: Autonomous systems
- 12 Trend 12: Generative AI
Trend 1: Data Fabric
Data Fabric provides flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, so data is available wherever it’s needed, regardless of where it’s stored.
Data Fabric can use analytics to learn and actively recommend where data should be used and manipulated. This can reduce data management overhead by up to 70%.
Trend 2: Cybersecurity Mesh
Cybersecurity Mesh is a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services.
Cybersecurity Mesh enables industry-leading, standalone security solutions to work together to improve overall security while bringing control points closer to the assets they are designed to protect. It can quickly and reliably verify identity, context, and policy compliance across cloud and non-cloud environments.
Trend 3: Privacy-enhancing computation
Privacy-enhancing computation secures the process of processing personal data in untrusted environments – which is becoming increasingly important due to evolving data protection and privacy laws and increasing consumer concerns.
Privacy-enhancing computation uses a variety of privacy protection techniques to extract value from data while meeting compliance requirements.
Trend 4: Cloud-native platforms
Cloud-native platforms are technologies that enable you to create new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile, allowing you to respond to rapid digital change.
Cloud-native platforms improve on the traditional lift-and-shift approach to cloud, which fails to meet cloud benefits and adds complexity to maintenance.
Trend 5: Composable applications
Composable applications are built from business-centric, modular components.
Composable applications make code easier to use and reuse, speed time-to-market for new software solutions, and unlock business value.
Trend 6: Decision Intelligence
Decision Intelligence is a practical approach to improving organizational decision making. He models each decision as a series of processes, using intelligence and analytics to make decisions, learn from them, and refine them.
Decision Intelligence can support and enhance human decision making and potentially automate it through the use of advanced analytics, simulation and AI.
Trend 7: Hyper-Automation
Hyperautomation (hyperautomation) is a disciplined, business-centric approach to quickly identify, inspect, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.
Hyper-automation enables scalability, decentralized operations and the disruption of business models.
Trend 8: AI engineering
AI engineering automates updating data, models, and applications to optimize AI delivery.
Combined with strong AI governance, AI engineering will operationalize the delivery of AI to ensure its ongoing business value.
Trend 9: Distributed Enterprises
Distributed Enterprises reflect a digital business model that focuses on people, customer and partner touchpoints are digitized, and product experiences are developed.
Distributed Enterprises better meet the needs of remote workers and consumers that are fueling demand for virtual services and hybrid workspaces.
Trend 10: Total Experience
Total Experience is a business strategy that integrates employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, user satisfaction and multiexperience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.
Total Experience can increase customer and employee trust, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy through holistic management of stakeholder experiences.
Trend 11: Autonomous systems
Autonomous systems are self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their environment and dynamically change their own algorithms in real time to optimize their behavior in complex ecosystems.
Autonomous systems generate a set of flexible technological capabilities capable of supporting new demands and situations, optimizing performance and repelling attacks without human intervention.
Trend 12: Generative AI
Generative AI learns about objects from data and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but do not repeat it.
Generative AI has the potential to generate new forms of creative content, such as video, and accelerate research and development cycles across fields and industries.
How technology trends are driving digital business
Key strategic technology trends will accelerate digital capabilities and drive growth by solving common business challenges for CIOs and technology leaders. They provide a roadmap that will help your organization differentiate itself from the competition, meet business goals, and position CIOs and IT leaders as strategic partners in the business.
They each provide one of three main results:
- Engineering Trust: Technologies in this segment create a more stable and efficient IT foundation by ensuring more secure integration and processing of data in cloud and non-cloud environments and enabling cost-effective scaling of the IT foundation.
- Sculpting Change: By using the creative new technology solutions in this space, you can scale and accelerate the digitization of your business. These technology trends enable you to respond to the increasing speed of change by building applications faster to automate business activities, optimize AI, and enable faster, smarter decisions.
- Accelerating Growth: By capitalizing on the strategic technology trends in this segment, you unleash IT multipliers who win business and market share. With these trends, you can maximize value creation and improve digital skills.
Now, look at how three trends—generative AI, cybersecurity mesh, and decision intelligence—will drive strategic change.
