Enterprises have adapted to the drastic changes brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, having accelerated digital transformation and emerging resilient.

The future will be distinctly different from the realities of January 2020, yet chief information officers (CIOs) are already charting a promising path towards the future.

These are the findings of audit, consulting, tax and advisory services firm Deloitte’s twelfth yearly technology trends report, which outlines the evolving technology landscape and the industry disruptors that will drive confidence in new planning and implementation for the next 18 to 24 months.

This year’s edition of the ‘Deloitte Tech Trends 2021’ report showcases nine trends such as technology enabling strategic design, supply chain transformation, embracing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as business imperatives, rebooting the digital workplace and realising the full benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Insights include strategy, risk and financal implications that will empower technology leaders, business leaders and board members.

“The report finds that some organisations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts not only to make their operations nimbler and more efficient, but to respond to dramatic fluctuations in demand and customer expectation,” says Deloitte Africa Consulting enterprise resource planning and CIO programme leader Kevin Govender.

“What we have seen from the report is that a number of businesses used the situation to translate challenges brought on by, for example, Covid-19 into opportunit

This is increasingly necessary as businesses will have to continually adapt to the new way of working.

“For a business to lead with confidence in today’s environment will require that they are technologically enabled for the future.

“The theme of this year’s report is resilience. We have seen countless inspiring examples of resilience this past year as organisations assessed their circumstances and revised their strategic plans,” says Deloitte Consulting emerging technologies research director and government and public services chief technology officer Scott Buchholz.

“Seemingly overnight, Covid-19 disrupted our assumptions and forced us to become more adaptable and responsive than we had previously thought possible. Comfortable plans for the future were condensed from years into weeks,” adds Deloitte Consulting global chief technology officer Bill Briggs.

“This growth was uncomfortable at best, but has driven important change, and the trends we are seeing suggest a more hopeful dimension to the turbulent events of the past year.”

Key trends observed by Deloitte include the future of the workplace, the industrialisation of AI initiatives, upgrades for the critical core and technology that supports DEI.

The trends fall into three categories, the first being ‘the heart of the enterprise’ encompassing the trends of ‘strategy, engineered’; ‘core revival’; and ‘supply unchained’, which focuses on the alignment of organisational and technology strategy.

Businesses and technology strategies are becoming increasingly inseparable, as technology choices bear a greater role in enabling or potentially constraining organisational strategy.

Under the trend of ‘strategy, engineered’, the report points out that there is a need to close the technology and business strategy chasm, as the past technology choices of many organisations are limiting strategic options and business agility, which now necessitates a “lean in” to technology architecture and technology implementation.

“Ultimately, strategists should collaborate with technology leaders to confirm that the organisation’s critical technologies support the organisational strategy and that the organisation’s technologists have the right framework and understanding of the corporate strategy to make their day-to-day technology decisions.”

In the second trend, ‘core revival’, Deloitte outlines how the modernisation of legacy enterprise systems and migrating them to the cloud may help improve an organisation’s digital potential.

“For many, the cost of needed cloud migrations and other core modernisation strategies can be prohibitive. This is about to change. In what we recognise as a growing trend, some pioneering companies are beginning to use clever outsourcing arrangements to reengineer traditional business cases for core modernisation.”

Meanwhile, under the ‘supply unchained’ trend, supply chains are moving out of the back office and onto the value-enabling front lines of customer segmentation and product differentiation.

Future-focused manufacturers, retailers and distributors, besides others, are exploring ways to transform the supply chain cost centre into a customer-focused driver of value, increasingly extracting more value from the data they collect, analyse and share across their supply networks.

In addition, some organisations are exploring opportunities to use robots, drones and advanced image recognition to make physical supply chain interactions more efficient, effective and safe for employees.

The category of ‘a better experience, inside and out’ comprises ‘bespoke for billions: digital meets physical’ and ‘rebooting the digital workplace’, which offer a view of two sides of the same evolving coin for customers, employees, and ‘stakeholders: how do you better merge the future of digital and physical experiences to drive more value’?

Companies will be looking to reboot the digital workplace as they determine what the future of the workplace will be following the world’s largest unplanned work-from-home experiment.

Further, consumers are increasingly expecting a blend of both physical and digital brand experiences that offer highly personalised, in-person experiences without sacrificing the convenience of online transactions.

This category also includes ‘DEI tech: tools for equity’, which discusses increasingly sophisticated tools to support organisational DEI across the talent life cycle, which is the spark that powers innovation.

Organisations are increasingly embracing DEI technology as business imperatives, with a growing number adopting holistic, organisationwide workforce strategies that address biases and inequities to enhance enterprise and employee performance.

he category of ‘data: the art of the possible’ shows that, as enterprises move further towards automation and machine-led decisioning, human capacity can be augmented at scale.

The trend of ‘MLOps: industrialised AI’; ‘machine data revolution: feeding the machine’; and ‘zero trust: never trust, always verify’ represent three specific opportunities for enterprises to realise more value through industrialisation and automation.

Industrialised AI, where sophisticated machine learning models help companies efficiently discover patterns, reveals anomalies, makes predictions and decisions and generates insights.

“With machine learning poised to overhaul enterprise operations and decision-making, a growing number of AI pioneers are realising that legacy data models and infrastructure – all designed to support decision-making by humans, not machines – could be a roadblock to machine learning success. In response, these organisations are taking steps to disrupt the data management value chain from end-to-end.”