Which are the 12 trends that are shaping the future of digital business? Gartner publishes an interesting ebook about the top strategic technology trends for 2022.

Engineering Trust

Digital business requires a resilient and efficient IT foundation at its core. Without well-designed base, there is no way to scale cost-efficiently. Which trends we will see in 2022 will improve technology trust?

1. Data Fabric: Often, data remains siloed within applications, which means it’s not being used as effectively as possible. Data fabric integrates data across platforms and users, making data available everywhere it’s needed. It is estimated that by 2024, data fabric developments will quadruple efficiency in data utilization while cutting human-driven data management tasks in half.
2. Cybersecurity Mesh: Digital business assets are distributed across the cloud and data centres. A cybersecurity mesh architecture provides a composable approach to security based on identity to create scalable and interoperable services. By 2024, organisations adopting a cybersecurity mesh architecture to integrate security tools to work as a cooperative ecosystem will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.
3. Privacy-Enhancing Computation: The real value of data exists not in simply having it, but in how it is used for AI models, analytics and insights. Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) approaches allow data to be shared across ecosystems, creating value but preserving privacy. Approaches vary but include encrypting, splitting or processing sensitive data to allow it to be handled without compromising confidentiality. By 2025, 60% of large organisations will use one or more privacy-enhancing computation techniques in analytics, business intelligence or cloud computing.
4. Cloud-Native Platforms: By 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives — up from less than 40% in 2021. Cloud-native platforms use the core elasticity and scalability of cloud computing to deliver faster time to value. They reduce dependencies on infrastructure, freeing up time to focus on application functionality instead.

Sculpting Change

With the trusted foundation in place, the next focus is technologies that enable the organization to scale its digitalization efforts. But IT cannot match the pace of change alone. Fusion teams — made up of IT and business staff — will collaborate and drive innovation to rapidly digitize the business.

5. Composable Applications: Fusion teams face many challenges: They can lack coding skills, be locked into the wrong technologies and are often tasked with fast-paced delivery. Composable applications are made up of packaged-business capabilities (PBCs) or software-defined business objects. PBCs — for example representing a patient or digital twin — create reusable modules that fusion teams can self-assemble to rapidly create applications, reducing time to market.
6. Decision Intelligence: Decision intelligence improves organizational decision making by modelling decisions through a framework. Integrating data, analytics and AI allows the creation of decision intelligence platforms to support, augment and automate decisions. In fact, By 2023, more than a third of large organizations will have analysts practising decision intelligence, including decision modelling.
7. Hyperautomation: Increased focuses on growth, digitalization and operational excellence have highlighted a need for better, more widespread automation. Hyperautomation is a business-driven approach to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.
8. AI Engineering: AI engineering is the discipline of operationalizing updates to AI models, using integrated data and model and development pipelines to deliver consistent business value from AI. By 2025, the 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than the 90% of enterprises that do not.

Accelerating growth

When the foundation and building blocks are established, it’s time to focus on technology trends that maximize the value of what the organization creates.

9. Distributed Enterprise: Distributed enterprise arose from two different areas. On one side, employees working remotely as a result of COVID-19 needed different tools and increased flexibility. On the other side, consumers increasingly aren’t available via traditional, physical avenues.
10. Total Experience: Total experience unifies four disciplines: customer experience, user experience, employee experience and multiexperience to create a better experience for consumers and employees. The goal is to interconnect and enhance each of these for a more holistic overall experience for all stakeholders.
11. Autonomic Systems: Autonomic systems are self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their environments. But unlike autonomous or automated systems, they can dynamically modify their own algorithms with no software updates. This allows rapid responses to change, enabling management at the scale of complex environments.
12. Generative AI: By 2025, generative AI will account for 10% of all data produced, up from less than 1% today. Generative AI is a form of AI that learns a digital representation of artefacts from sample data and uses it to generate new, original, realistic artefacts that retain a likeness to the training data but don’t repeat it. That allows generative AI to be an engine of rapid innovation for enterprises.