The continuing disruption of businesses caused by technological developments is evolving into the “business of technology”, or how business and technology leaders are harnessing the forces of change sweeping through industries and economies to improve their operations, says the tenth yearly ‘Deloitte Tech Trends’ report, released last month.
Disruption of the business and consumer world is set to continue with a new set of technologies, but the question is how technology and business leaders can harness these forces to deliver value in response to disruptive technologies as part of a “controlled collision” that leads them to further digital frontiers, says Deloitte Europe, Middle East and Africa technology research and insights leader Hans van Grieken.
“Cloud, analytics and digital experience technologies have disrupted IT operations and business models over the past ten years. Although these widely used systems and models can no longer be termed trends, their full potential remains largely untapped and they continue to impact on the business of technology.”
The current disruptive trends are digital reality, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality, the Internet of Things and immersive and spatial technologies; cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies; and trust- and security-technologies such as blockchain.
Over the next five years, these technologies will become as important as the cloud, analytics and customer experience technologies are today, he says.
The emerging disruptive trends are the modernisation of core legacy systems and the inclusion of cyberrisk as a strategic priority. The third emerging trend is the business of technology, which is a recognition that all companies are now technology companies, says Van Grieken.
“Delivering on the promises of technology and the expectations of clients in a complex environment comprising a collection of interdependencies is difficult. There is, therefore, a move to improve agility to support the fast-paced development of functions that are built on scalable systems and which are then exposed as services.”
This form of development and operations (DevOps) is, however, changing to include security, or DevSecOps, at every stage of development to make systems secure by design without losing agility and rapid development pace.