At the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas last week, analysts from the global research firm explored lessons that business and IT leaders have learned during ongoing disruption and uncertainty, presenting the top 10 strategic predictions for IT organizations and users in 2022 and beyond.
Gartner’s top predictions explore three aspects of the lessons learned – the push toward human centricity, the race to resilience, and the ability to reach beyond expectations.
“The lesson of the pandemic has been to expect the unexpected and be prepared to move in multiple strategic directions at once,” said Daryl Plummer, distinguished research vice-president and Gartner Fellow. “Leaders that embrace options for workers, enhanced enterprise efficiency and accelerated transformation plans have greater resilience in dealing with change.
“Resilience, opportunity and risk have always been components of good business strategy, but today these issues hold new meaning. This year’s predictions embody how resilience must be built in more non-traditional ways, from talent to business modularity, while opportunity and risk must be viewed with a greater sense of urgency than ever before.”
Here’s a roundup of the predictions:
- Consumers are getting smarter by the day: Gartner predicts that by 2024, 40 per cent of consumers will trick behaviour tracking metrics to intentionally devalue the personal data collected about them, making it difficult to monetize.
- As hybrid work continues, removing the traditional manager role can be a more pragmatic route to efficiency, according to Gartner, and it looks like the analysts at the research and advisory firm think many organizations have started to realize that. It predicts that by 2024, 30 per cent of corporate teams will be without a boss due to the self-directed and hybrid nature of work.
- Using high-quality and high-volume synthetic data, which is data generated using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, is a powerful way to understand humans at scale, according to Gartner’s Plummer. With synthetic data gaining momentum, Gartner predicts that by 2025, synthetic data will reduce personal customer data collection, avoiding 70 per cent of privacy violation sanctions.
- With losses produced by recent large-scale attacks aimed at critical infrastructure reaching unprecedented levels, military involvement will become necessary in deterring non-state actors from targeting critical infrastructure, according to Gartner. The company predicts that by 2024, a cyberattack will so damage critical infrastructure that a member of the G20 will reciprocate with a declared physical attack.
- Progressive CIOs are shifting their mindset to see volatility as an opportunity. Business composability, or the modular redesign of operational assets to minimize interdependencies, enables work to be recomposed quickly, easily and safely, says Gartner. The company predicts that by 2024, 80 per cent of CIOs surveyed will list modular business redesign through composability as a top five reason for accelerated business performance.
- Businesses have long realized that keeping a poor-fit customer can be costly, both in terms of time spent satisfying them and in the long-term profit erosion that can occur. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75 per cent of companies will “break up” with poor-fit customers as the cost of retaining them eclipses good-fit customer acquisition costs.
- In the next three years, there will be nearly 900,000 professional developers across Africa enabled by the rise of informal education channels. As this market continues to grow, global investors will reduce their venture investment in China in favor of this emerging market, according to Gartner. The company predicts that through 2026, a 30 per cent increase in developer talent across Africa will help transform it into a world-leading startup ecosystem, rivaling Asia in venture fund growth.
- Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unique and non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger, are becoming a way to use hyper-tokenization to grow business models exponentially, as buyers are expected to pay more for a digital artifact because they belong to a network of people with similar values and interests. By 2024, Gartner predicts that 50 per cent of publicly listed companies will have some sort of NFT underpinning their brand and/or digital ecosystem presence. The company also predicts that by 2026, NFT gamification will propel an enterprise into the top 10 highest-valued companies.
- The introduction of LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite constellations will make it economical to extend network coverage into sparsely populated regions, says Gartner. It predicts that by 2027, low orbit satellites will extend internet coverage to an additional billion of the world’s poorest people, raising 50 per cent of them out of poverty.
- “The winners of the next decade will be experts at neuromining — applying behavioral intelligence and related technology to analyze, understand and influence human behavior at scale,” says Plummer. Gartner predicts that by 2027, a quarter of the Fortune 20 companies will be supplanted by companies that neuromine and influence subconscious behaviour at scale.