Technology Trends 2021: How Business Benefits From Digitization

The importance of digitization has risen slightly for companies, administrations in last twelve month. When assessing new technology trends, CIOs are more skeptical than managers from specialist departments. The balance sheet for intelligent technologies is similarly different, and on average more than every third user sees it as a success. This is shown by the results of the IT trends study carried out annually in September and October by Capgemini, in which 120 specialists and IT managers from companies, Austria, and Switzerland took part.

Technology Trends: Success In Digitization

According to their statements, almost 41 percent of the participants, including IT service providers and companies from the automotive, retail, and consumer goods industries, and the public sector, achieved outstanding digitization successes. This means that the number of successful companies has increased slightly, but overall the balance sheet has hardly changed. Only around 37 percent of users rate the use of intelligent technologies as prosperous, with managers in the specialist departments ordering it much more positively than CIOs.

“Business benefits from digitization and the use of intelligent technologies. They make the daily work of the specialist departments easier. At the same time, IT has to cope with the increasing complexity and the high rate of change,”.

Technology Trends: Change Management Ensures Good Results

The successful use of intelligent technologies correlates with the intensity with which employees are informed, mobilized, and qualified. Further success factors are the definition of a strategy, the change of processes, restructuring, and active technology management. Successful companies also operate their intelligent systems more frequently than others themselves. They generally do significantly better than other companies regarding digitization, especially when opening up new business areas in different industries.

Therefore, companies should not get bogged down and initiate too many projects simultaneously after the first success. You’d better start small, build a scalable technology platform and implement one use case after another.

Securing Intelligent Systems

The majority of the respondents think it makes sense to give themselves ethical framework conditions, document the decisions of intelligent systems, and keep algorithms, which is already mandatory in some fields of application. The external review of the security measures against the manipulation of learning systems and the assessment of the training data concerning discrimination also met with majority approval. The latter could be carried out externally or by an independent entity within the company, as with other compliance issues.

Disclosure requirements for algorithms and the restriction of the operation of intelligent systems to European cloud providers are met with mixed feedback. In contrast, the majority rejects the disclosure of training data and the restriction of the areas of application by the legislator. “Companies that use intelligent technologies expect that they will significantly increase competitive pressure worldwide. That’s why they don’t want to risk losing touch internationally due to excessive restrictions,”.

Technology Trends: IT Security Tasks

The most important topic of the year is security automation. Security tasks are becoming more diverse and extensive in the context of digitization and not least because of the GDPR. In places, two to five are the management of digital identities, the development of new platforms for sales, customer contact, ERP or the Internet of Things (IoT), protection against threats from IoT-enabled devices, and the use of DevOps.

The digital wallet, virtual or augmented reality solutions and the digital twin have grown in importance. The increase in volume was most evident in security automation and cognitive security, which are closely related.

The results of the study at a glance:

• Intelligent technologies such as machine learning, predictive analytics, or image recognition are only making slow progress. Problem number one is still the lack of suitable employees. However, the situation has eased slightly compared to last year.
• The use of cloud services has increased steadily over the past eight years. More than 70 percent of all IT services now come from a cloud.
• The services users currently rate the dependency on cloud providers neither as negligibly low nor as alarmingly high. However, more than three quarters expect it to rise in the future.
• Almost 61 percent of companies exchange data along their supply chain. However, they are very reluctant to pass on data to third parties – partners outside the supply chain or competitors.
• In contrast to the previous year, this year’s list of projects largely coincides with the list of priorities. The main focus is on implementing the technologies currently of the most significant importance or has become increasingly important.

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