These Six Trends will Impact Your 2019 Digital Transformation Journey

“Business transformation is accelerating as enterprises make big bets on digital strategy to gain operational efficiencies, invent new markets, redesign customer experiences and achieve savings they can reinvest to fund a digital future,” said Dan Hushon, senior vice president and chief technology officer, DXC Technology. “Enterprise leaders should examine how these six trends will shape their digital journey so they can get it right, learn fast and execute forward in 2019.”

Hushon identified six digital trends that will accelerate business transformation in 2019:

1) Enterprises go after digital business moonshots

In 2019, enterprises will make more aligned, bet-the-company execution decisions to accelerate digital business. Expect to see new businesses, business models and technologies built from digital. A unified digital strategy between the business and IT is the only way to unload the compounding technical debt that is holding companies back from exploring moonshot digital initiatives. It’s all about focusing, accelerating digital transformation, having the stamina to succeed and achieving nonlinear growth.

2) Enterprises adopt next-generation IoT platforms

As enterprises map their physical world to an intelligence-rich digital one, smart “things” become a driving force for implementing next-generation platforms in 2019. This advance will enable large quantities of industry-specific data from the internet of things (IoT) to be analyzed, uncovering novel, hyper-dimensional correlations that provide fresh insights, enhanced decision making and better business outcomes.

3) Action at the edge disrupts the cloud

The IT industry continues to build out what we call “the Matrix,” the pervasive, intelligent IT infrastructure that goes beyond cloud to include edge computing, IoT platforms, machine intelligence, augmented reality/virtual reality, blockchain and more. Companies will build completely new ways to leverage the Matrix, including decentralized applications (DApps), shifting power from a small number of central players to a large number of participants. Additionally, a shift toward event-driven applications and serverless architectures allows very small and specific applications to run in lightweight environments such as pocket or wrist devices.

4) Enterprises enter the age of Information Enlightenment

Leveraging information will become a core competency in 2019. Companies that experience Information Enlightenment will realize that artificial intelligence and machine learning can improve service offerings and generate new sources of revenue — but only with the right algorithms, model orchestration, data and infrastructure.

5) Enterprises redesign customer experiences amid stronger data privacy rules

Protecting customers’ personal data will force companies to rethink their digital strategy as the full effects of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set in. Enterprises must create privacy-centric information ecosystems, with analytics and security as the foundation, as they aim to deliver secure interactions and superior customer experiences.

6) Companies begin closing their data centers

The enterprise data center is becoming less relevant as the data arrival and business processing shift to the cloud. To operate more efficiently and derive more value from their data, enterprises are shifting workloads to public cloud providers, who have massive bandwidth and strategically placed data centers. The trend will play out over the next three to five years, as cloud migration gives way to “built for cloud” replacements.