What can we look forward to in 2022?

It’s always interesting to see what Gartner highlights as the top 10 strategic technology trends for the year ahead and beyond. This year, they are predicting the following:

Synthetic data for better privacy – by 2025, they say, synthetic data will reduce personal customer data collection, avoiding 70% of privacy violation sanctions. Synthetic data is artificially-created data rather than being data that’s generated by actual events. It is often created using AI techniques. Its use is growing in popularity, because it can serve as a proxy for real data, reducing or eliminating the risks of exposing private consumer information or sensitive data. A second benefit that comes from it not being real data, is that it lessens regulatory concerns and can actually provide more precise insights because AI can better model often-unpredictable customer behaviour. Synthetic data can be used to train and test AI models to handle unplanned disruptions, unexpected events, and scenario planning, which, ultimately, will make an organization more resilient.

Consumers fight data collection – by 2024, 40% of consumers will trick behaviour-tracking metrics, thereby intentionally devaluing the personal data about them that’s collected, which will make it difficult to monetize. Consumers know that vast amounts of data about them is being collected by various organizations. This tactic becomes a way for them to stop being treated as a commodity by these organizations

Mining brain data – by 2027, a quarter of Fortune 20 companies will be supplanted by companies that neuromine and influence subconscious behaviour at scale. Neuromining is the application of behavioural intelligence and related technology to analyse, understand, and influence human behaviour at scale. It will enable organizations to gain a deeper understanding of consumers, which will drive better customer relationships and elevate employee engagement. As neuroscience continues to evolve, this technique will grow increasingly sophisticated and precise. By 2027, Gartner estimates, a quarter of Fortune 20 companies will be supplanted by companies that neuromine and influence subconscious behaviour at scale.

Agile in; managers out – by 2024, 30% of corporate teams will be without a boss due to the agile and hybrid nature of work. With agile adoption at 30% and hybrid work at 50% of organizations, about one-third of teams can operate without a traditional manager role. The pandemic has driven increased need for organizational resilience, driving more embedded agility within businesses. By definition, agile requires an environment of trust that doesn’t lend itself to traditional hierarchies. The increase in hybrid workforces reveals that a large portion of managers lack the skillset necessary to manage employees in remote or hybrid situations, and only 47% percent of employees believe that their manager can lead the team to success in the future.

Africa: the next great start-up hub – through 2026, a 30% increase in developer talent across Africa will help transform it into a world-leading start-up ecosystem, rivalling Asia in venture fund growth.

Modular business or bust – by 2024, 80% of CIOs surveyed will list modular business redesign, through composability, as a top-five reason for accelerated business performance. Composability, ie the modular redesign of operational assets to minimize interdependencies, enables work to be recomposed quickly, easily, and safely. Currently, 74% of organizations have some kind of modular or component-based technology implementation underway. Generally, organizations will be focused on flexibility and adaptability over stability in order to counter market volatility.

The war on cyberattacks – by 2024, a cyberattack will so damage critical infrastructure that a member of the G20 will reciprocate with a declared physical attack. While recent large-scale cybersecurity attacks on hospitals, governments, and energy facilities have been considered crimes, the increasingly devastating fallout means they’ll soon be considered acts of war. An increase in regulation on a national level will highlight that enterprises cannot be solely responsible for limiting the scope of damage. Cyberattacks by non-state actors against critical infrastructure will eventually diminish in frequency and intensity as cybercriminals adjust to the reality of kinetic reprisals by military and intelligence agencies.

Breakup with bad customers – by 2025, 75% of companies will ‘break up’ with poor-fit customers because the cost of retaining them eclipses good-fit customer acquisition costs. Organizations often accept poor-fit customers into the sales pipeline and attempt to retain them without adequately considering how costly those customers are for the organization. It costs time and money to satisfy poor-fit customers: for example, to customize offers or design solutions to suit them. As leaders understand more about those costs, they’ll become more comfortable with letting go unproductive customers, given the drain on brand and long-term profits — not to mention the emotional toll on employees.

Hyper-fixation on hyper-tokenization – by 2026, non-fungible token gamification will propel an enterprise into the top 10 highest valued companies. A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data, eg a photo, video, audio file, or even a tweet that can be verified. Companies are quickly recognizing the potential of non-fungible tokens to grow business models and drive new revenue streams. Public blockchains are exponentially growing the ability to digitally connect value represented by tokens, bringing yet another wave of seemingly limitless opportunities in the digital world. Fungible and non-fungible tokens are driving a segment of this new phenomenon, which is called ‘hyper-tokenization’. By 2024, Gartner predicts that 50% of publicly listed companies will have some sort of NFT underpinning their brand and/or digital ecosystem presence

More Internet for less – by 2027, low-orbit satellites will extend Internet coverage to an additional billion of the world’s poorest people, raising 50% of them out of poverty. Establishing cellular bases in rural areas is expensive and inefficient. Low orbit satellites offer a cheaper, more flexible solution. They’re able to provide islands of connectivity, so networks can deploy directly where the customers are, rather than rolling out across a country in a linear fashion. Also, new satellites can be launched to address increased need. As the Internet becomes more widely available, it will add billions of newly connected ‘netizens’ shifting the internet in terms of content and culture.

It will be interesting to see how many of these come true!

Also, don’t forget that you still have time to complete the mainframe use survey at itech-ed.com/AMY22/usersurvey22/.

And it’s the second week of the excellent GSE Conference. To register, go to https://conferences.gse.org.uk/register.