Business-led technology and applications have become the basis for business planning and integral parts of companies’ strategies. Strategic investment by companies in several developing technologies can result in significant benefits for a company, says business services firm Deloitte global chief technology officer Mark White.

Companies, and specifically CIOs, struggle to keep pace with the rate of change of information technology (IT) in the business world, but business IT simultaneously forms part of any new operations, systems or marketing considered by companies. This dichotomy is one of the disruptive trends for technology in the coming 18 to 24 months.

The fact that most companies in the world have fully adopted IT for business, with IT systems and functionalities often necessary for successful operations, demonstrates that business worldwide has entered the postdigital era, similar to the postindustrial era when industrialisation was the common platform from which companies competed, he explains.

“Innovation and developments in IT systems can lead to significant rewards for companies if they prove to be beneficial. A new role that CIOs will have to fulfil will be to invest in new and emerging technologies, not as the implementers of technology, but as the custodians of a wider role to plan, build and harvest promising emerging technology investments,” adds White.

This means that the CIOs of today’s successful companies will need to be able to occupy an executive seat and give input to the company’s strategic direction, he highlights.

Meanwhile, Deloitte also predicts more machine-to-machine communication and industrial automation, as well as a move to mobile management of these processes.

Mobility will not replace desktop or Web-based functionality, but will work in conjunction with current infrastructure to complement it rather than to immediately replace it.

Mobility coupled with business intelli- gence and visualisation enables companies to provide enriched contextual information for all their workers, when and where they need it. It reduces risks to operators and enables them to move off the factory floor, while simultaneously providing them with an interactive, holistic oversight of their operations, notes White.

“The use of offsite experts highlights another technology trend by companies to ‘find the face of their data’. This refers to the fact that all the machine learning in the world might still miss some of the more subtle and hidden variables and patterns in the data that only a trained expert with many years of experience has the intuition to identify. Big Data machines still need human intervention to ensure the correct interpretation of the data analysis.”

The ease of collaboration between employees – identified as social business or Enterprise 2.0 – thorough operator oversight and control, maintenance workflow management and rich information to base decisions on all point to the use of mobile capabilities in plants and factories increasing continuously in the future, concludes White.