Digital Era Opportunities and Challenges

As they evolve in 2018, there will be shift from a stand—alone to collaborative mode wherein intelligent things can communicate with one another and act in collaboration to accomplish tasks.

3. Social

You cannot focus on customers without focusing on ‘social’. Social taps into customer behavior and engagement like no other aspect of digital.

For organizations to benefit from social media technology and collaboration, employees need to be enabled with ‘time’ through productivity tools. Investments in making ‘time’ available and a well thought through Advocacy Plan (both internal and external) backed by the correct partners and tools will help digital leaders add exponential value to their businesses. Along with social media technology and collaboration, online communities will play a critical aspect, not only for advocacy but for product research, segmentation and long range planning as well.

4. Connected

‘Connected’ means Dynamic connection of people, processes, things and services supporting intelligent digital ecosystems. Conversational systems range from simple informal, bidirectional text or voice conversations to more complex interactions like human conversations with multiple interpretations and emotions. Conversational systems have shifted from a model where people adapt to computers to one where the computers adapt to a person’s desired outcome.

The communication across devices will result in inter – connected intelligent devices. The inter-connected intelligent devices will lead to the rise of cloud and server-less computing, containers and micro-services as well as APIs to deliver modular, flexible and dynamic solutions. 2018 will see wide-spread acceptance of cloud computing across various industries. This evolution of inter-connected intelligent devices needs to be coupled with security which is challenging.

Multilayered security and use of user and entity behavior analytics will become a requirement for virtually every enterprise in 2018.

With these trends, I hope 2018 is full of excitement for all my colleagues in digital leadership.

Challenges

With the exponential growth of IoT and digitization, connecting everything, securely and seamlessly require industry to enable architecture that allow for convergence of a growing array of access technologies. The development of IoT has suffered from a lack of standards. Efforts in the market to “self-standardize” are delivering a huge boost to the overall development of IoT.

Harvesting and leveraging big data is becoming mainstream yet plenty of issues remain, especially in the public domain, with issues concerning ownership, privacy and cyber security hovering in the background.

Cyber security poses a major challenge as the world currently deals with 2.5 million cyber security threats per second.

Digitization is creating a demand for the right professionals—engineers, network and solution architects, big data analysts etc. with the right skill set. Digitization is triggering an economic revolution. Government and enterprise will have to collaborate in order to anticipate and respond to the exponential change digitization produces.