Across industries, organizations of all sizes continue to adopt digital solutions to increase productivity, efficiency, and profitability through a combination of software-defined architectures, DevOps, cloud, 5G, and AI/ML. As companies integrate these new technologies into their IT infrastructure to shift and scale as needs evolve, new trends and tools emerge that create competitive advantages for the organizations adopting them.
In 2023, a significant theme in digital transformation has been the wide adoption of automation. Automation removes the requirement for manual, human execution of mundane tasks and procedures, dramatically accelerating their completion while lowering or eliminating human error. Not surprisingly, automation has been a key theme woven through three major trends we’ve seen so far this year:
- Sustainability: Organizations are investing significantly in technologies to advance their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals by leveraging key innovations such as AI, ML, cloud, blockchain, analytics, IoT, and renewable energy. And for good reason. According to a Sustainable Tech Research report by Accenture, companies with higher sustainability performance across ESG indicators perform better financially than their peers. The report cites sustainability as a top priority for most organizations, with 92% aiming to achieve net-zero emission targets by 2030.1 To meet this tight timeline, CIOs need to transition off energy-hungry IT infrastructure, automate the shutdown of stranded cloud environments, and embed sustainability throughout their supply chain to reduce carbon emissions.
- Customer-centricity: The customer’s experience with your brand and solutions has become a top priority for digital transformation in 2023. New initiatives, such as human-centric design, incorporate automation technologies like automated reporting, language translation, and intelligent aids to enhance the capabilities and effectiveness of human operators responsible for complex operating systems. Human-centric design will be a leading transformation initiative, requiring process mapping and driving innovative ways to improve the customer experience. According to a CIO.com survey, 58% of respondents cited “increasing customer value” as their number one strategic business focus for 2023.2
- Digital immunity: Immunity has also become a top priority for CIOs who want to reduce risk and build hardened security into their systems. A digital immune system (DIS) combines practices and technologies for software design, development, operations, and analytics to cumulatively enhance business performance through risk mitigation. Digital immunity makes applications more resilient, systems more highly available, and ensures speedy recovery and overall business continuity. Data-driven insights combined with automated processes for identifying and resolving problems ensure stable processes and outcomes. Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80%, which translates directly into higher revenue.3
The road to digital transformation is paved with automation. By incorporating these automation-based trends into your strategy, you can stay competitive and tee up your organization for future success.
- Accenture, Research Sustainable Tech Survey, May 2022
- CIO, Must Read: New Trends for Digital Transformation in 2023 – Value Stream Management, February 2023
- Gartner, Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023, October 2022
