10 Digital Transformation Technologies & Trends That Will Dominate Enterprises in 2022

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the digital transformation market to grow from USD 290.00 Billion in 2018 to USD 665.00 Billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.1% during the forecast period. I know this piece of news will delight leading digital transformation services around the world.

The report also reveals that the digital transformation market has witnessed substantial growth, owing to digitalizing organizational business functions to serve changing customer preferences and enhance operational efficiency, rapid proliferation of mobile devices and apps, and increasing penetration of IoT and adoption of cloud services, and need to improve operational performance to gain competitive benefits in the market. (Source: MarketsandMarkets)

As digital business transformation is going to take the center stage of most organizations, here are the top 10 digital transformation trends that will dominate the enterprise landscape in 2022.

• Customer Experience

Customers. Customers. Customers. The year of 2022 is going to be customer experience-driven and everything businesses must resonate with customer expectations and needs. Starting right from technology implementation to changes in organization models/culture, everything must embrace a customer-first approach.

•  Analytics

Identifying technology, tools, and techniques to collect data from every stage of the business process is critical and companies are trying hard to invest in such elements for leveraging the data to actionable insights. The year 2022 will see companies focusing and investing mostly on analytics to gain competitive advantage and leveraging data for delivering better customer experience. 

• Data governance (big data)

The advent of technology like Big Data has enabled enterprises to amass a large volume of data for better decision making. But, the real challenge is what to do with tons of data garnered! Many brands are still clueless about leveraging the data amassed and turning them into actionable insight.

Defining a solution to overcome this growing challenge would top the agenda of most industry leaders in 2022. Data security along with data processing would be other priorities for organizations this year. 

• IT will become the “new†business enabler

2022 will see the rise of CIOs leading the digital transformation initiatives as they have a thorough understanding of the organization’s ecosystem and can take the digital initiatives to the stakeholders. This helps enterprises to overcome resistance to cultural challenges and new technology implementation. 

• Internet of Things

Indeed IoT. While we all have read about or in somewhat experienced about IoT, the truth is that the rate of adoption of IoT has not been uniform across industries. Today, IoT spending is dominated by the manufacturing sector. 

However, IoT unleashes new opportunities for several industries, through smart connected products and machines, and enables the continuous collection of environmental and user data that can be used to improve business and service performance. 2019-20 could be the breakthrough year for the wide adoption of IoT.

A World Economic Forum report says – Historically, consumption patterns were based on a “first moment of truth†(influencer), then a “second moment of truth†(at retail) and then a “third moment of truth†(consumption). IoT has the potential to move all three steps to a “continuous moment of truthâ€. This effectively reduces the traditional barriers to entry and could affect business models as it changes the economics of trial. 

• Conversational Artificial Intelligence & ML

Artificial Intelligence will move from boardroom talk to adoption; from use only by large, tech-savvy corporations to enterprises of all sizes across industries; from use cases in limited scenarios like banking/ customer care to several business processes. Why?

Because of three reasons.

(1) Digitalization has given rise to very large, diverse data sets, and an ever-accelerating accumulation of data

(2) The rapid growth of computing capacity and decreasing prices, which enable the processing of large data sets by an increasing number of users

(3) Evolution of new data-use algorithms. 

And, as AI is capable of learning and making decisions almost in the same way as human beings and enables machines, devices, programs, systems, and services to function in a manner that is sensible – enterprises will lap up the possibility of making sense of data through AI.

Industry leaders like Microsoft are trying hard to come up with conversational AI to help users with solutions to even most critical and complex queries. The practical application of the advanced conversational AI will take some time and this year most industry leaders are laying the foundation for the same. 

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is gaining attraction and over the past few months, most tech conferences are necessitating the importance of RPA’s benefits for different industries. 2022 will be a remarkable year for RPA as businesses have started to realize the potential benefits and planning to invest hugely in RPA to accelerate business growth and success. 

• Multi-Cloud computing and Everything-as-a-Service (Xaas)

Increasingly organizations will use the cloud to bring applications, data, and IT services closer to customers in order to improve the performance of digital touchpoints. This has another significant benefit for them. Easy use of analytics by moving the data closer to the analysis engine.

A multi-cloud strategy is going to be all the rage in 2022. Enterprises are not so keen on investing in Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud types due to varying requirements. Also, top research studies indicate that everything-as-a-service (XaaS) will gain momentum and might even become mainstream in the year of 2022. 

• Partnerships and acquisitions

Partnerships and acquisitions will hold the key to digital transformation success. Companies have to align with partners on a strategic or technical or expertise level to help enterprises with successful digital transformations. Top brands have already started to acquire tech-based startups to cater to the needs of modern-day customers. 

• Digital privacy

The latest GDPR rules have indicated clearly that customers can opt-in or opt-out of any data collection schemes without any discomfort, unlike in the past. Customer’s privacy will be highly valued and companies have to ensure transparency during data collection activities carried out through various channels to escape customer outrage.