The company’s FutureScape report for 2023 cites persistent skills shortages, more problems in the technology supply chain and a need for confidence in automation in the list of the top 10 IT forecasts.
Digital-first organizations will be able to quickly adapt to the interconnected economic, political and social volatility that the coming years are sure to bring, according to a new report from IDC in which the 10 Global Forecasts for the IT Industry.
Leading organizations will weather these disruptive storms “by transforming into resilient digital businesses where value creation is based on the effective use of rapidly evolving and innovative technologies,” the report said.
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While many organizations are implementing tech initiatives, to be successful they must move to a digital-first mindset, according to Rick Villars, group vice president of worldwide research at IDC.
IDC’s FutureScape 2023 study focuses on the external drivers that will change the global business ecosystem in the next 12 to 24 months and the challenges IT teams worldwide will face. Here are the company’s technical forecasts.
1. As-a-service processes and smart products will flourish.
The number of technology-focused organizations in the Fortune Global 500 list will double in the next five years. There will be a greater emphasis on adding as-a-service elements, such as enhanced customer experience and intelligent process automation, to digitally enhanced physical and virtual products that will dominate future IT budgets.
2. The growth of tech-by-wire will drive the business models of as-a-service.
One of the most visible developments in the IT industry in the coming years is the expanded delivery of technology via tech-by-wire, which IDC defines as “an attempt to expand the ideas of software-defined compute, storage, network, devices, plus the from a cloud-based control aircraft to a well-known system design idea in aviation: fly by wire,” Villars told TechRepublic. “It is used in most modern passenger aircraft and all high-performance military aircraft.”
There will be standalone systems, software-defined functions, AI-assisted cloud-based control systems and data-driven decision-making, the IDC report said. While cost will be a major driver of tech-by-wire adoption, additional benefits include enhanced digital resilience, faster access at scale to innovative technologies, system simplification and the reduction of technical debt.
3. Benefits of IT investments are hampered by critical skills shortages.
Most companies will struggle to retain and find employees with the right skills, putting more pressure on the remaining employees to meet growing digital business demands. Businesses and IT providers will need to invest in developing the right engineering, collaboration and critical thinking skills.
4. Digital sovereignty will pack a punch.
Cloud and as-a-service offerings will be at the heart of digital sovereignty developments, but personnel, budgets and business processes will be impacted by residency restrictions. This will drive a bit IaaS/Easter workloads to local cloud providers, along with mandates for sustainable operations.
5. Increased spending on as-a-service provides greater control.
While costs are a major concern for most enterprises, they hide the main benefit of using as-a-service effectively: significant and sustained reductions in operating burdens and much faster access to innovation. To control spending, leaders must evaluate which services deliver the promised operational and innovation values.
6. Service providers will be better equipped to provide expertise.
With the shift to more standardized aaS offerings and greater use of AI and automation, providers of security, data and critical industry-specific knowledge will be able to create economies of scale and spread the costs of high-quality experts across more customers.
The “level of willingness and even requirement that providers offering as-a-service versions of products include access to ‘expertise’ as an integrated part of their offerings” came as a surprise, Villars said.
7. Technical supply chains will still be a headache for the digital business C-suite.
In 2025, IDC expects some highly visible digital product launches to experience significant delays due to global or regional issues with the silicon and code supply chain. Decision makers will push for quantifiable results from their cloud providers, invest in supply chain intelligence and adopt multi-sourcing strategies to avoid these delays.
8. IT teams will struggle with the transition to control aircraft-based systems.
Navigating the maturation of control plane design (that is, the part of a network that transports information needed to set up and operate the network) and the gradual consolidation of basic control systems on a few standard platforms will be one of the most challenging tasks IT teams face. be faced in the coming years. IDC expects that more than half of enterprises will try to use tech-by-wire offerings, but struggle with too many isolated control systems.
9. Automation needs confidence to succeed.
In the field of human/organizational behaviour, more attention will have to be paid to creating trust in automation. While there may not be major risks if there is a lack of trust, it will have a significant impact on branding.
10. Machine vision will dramatically improve experiences in physical locations.
Organizations leading the way in adopting machine-augmented vision in digitally optimized work/play/health spaces will have a long-term competitive advantage in gaining and retaining customer loyalty. They will also benefit from better business outcomes by using intelligent data.
Villars said he was pleased that IDC developed this forecast a few months ago and began sharing it with clients’ strategy teams – ahead of announcements by Intel on Geti and Google, a few weeks before the company’s report was released, previewed its “vision acceleration service offering.”
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