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Accenture’s Technology Vision report pinpoints the emerging IT developments that will have the greatest impact on companies, government agencies, and other organizations in the next three to five years. The 2016 version investigates five trends behind a ‘˜people-first’ approach: Intelligent automation, liquid workforces, the platform economy, predictable disruption and digital trust.
People First: The Primacy of People in a Digital Age
Accenture argues that:
We are in the midst of a major technology revolution, specifically a digital revolution. Our research model and analysis shows that digital is now dominating every sector of the economy. However, winners in the digital age do much more than tick off a checklist of technology capabilities. They know their success hinges on people. The ability to understand changing customer needs and behaviors is, of course, vital. But the real deciding factor in the era of intelligence will be a company’ s ability to evolve its corporate culture to not only take advantage of emerging technologies, but also, critically, embrace the new business strategies that those technologies drive.
Enterprises must focus on enabling people’”consumers, workers and ecosystem partners’”to accomplish more with technology. They will have to create a new corporate culture that looks at technology as the way to enable people to constantly adapt and learn, continually create new solutions, drive relentless change, and disrupt the status quo. In an age where the focus is locked on technology, the true leaders will, in fact, place people first.
Technology Vision 2016 Trends
This year’ s Accenture Technology Vision highlights five emerging technology trends shaping this new landscape. Although each trend starts with technology, the company’s ‘˜People First’ theme flows through each of them.
Trend 1: Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation is the launching pad for new growth and innovation. Powered by artificial intelligence, the next wave of solutions will gather unprecedented amounts of data from disparate systems and’”by weaving systems, data, and people together’”create solutions that fundamentally change the organization, as well as what it does and how it does it.
Trend 2: Liquid Workforce
Companies are investing in the tools and technologies they need to keep pace with constant change in the digital era. But there is typically a critical factor that is falling behind: the workforce. Companies need more than the right technology; they need to harness that technology to enable the right people to do the right things in an adaptable, change-ready, and responsive liquid workforce.
Trend 3: Platform Economy
The next wave of disruptive innovation will arise from the technology-enabled, platform-driven ecosystems now taking shape across industries. Having strategically harnessed technology to produce
digital businesses, leaders are now creating the adaptable, scalable, and interconnected platform economy that underpins success in an ecosystem-based digital economy.
Trend 4: Predictable Disruption
Every business now understands the transformational power of digital. What few, though, have grasped is quite how dramatic and ongoing the changes arising from new platform-based ecosystems will be. It’ s not just business models that will be turned on their heads. As these ecosystems produce powerful, predictable disruption, whole industries and economic segments will be utterly redefined and reinvented.
Trend 5: Digital Trust
Pervasive new technologies raise potent new digital risk issues. Without trust, businesses cannot share and use the data that underpins their operations. That’ s why the most advanced security systems today go well beyond establishing perimeter security and incorporate a powerful commitment to the highest ethical standards for data.