Thursday 28 December 2017

2018 in Digital

Recently, the UK budget was set with a few old fashioned measures for increasing productivity, Investment in Infrastructure and More Money for Apprenticeships.

I then read someone's blog which suggested that this had missed the mark. His premise was that investment in technology usually fails and there is a need to continue to emphasise other traditional business change and simplicity measures such as clear strategic leadership, process design and email de-cluttering. He produced statistics to show that e-mail costs more than the UK's contributions to the EU's budget. Although I thought that this particular commentary missed the disasters caused by poor collaboration by business leaders and the failure to work together as a unified team.

At the same time, a commentary in Forbes suggested that 2018 will be the year of software automation with a sudden increase in the trading of enterprise data sets and a huge increase in the number of data scientists. Although the breaks to this are whether data sets are considered valuable IPR and the need to train up a lot more people in aspects of data science.

Contino and Gartner have identified 2018 as the year of DevOps with DevOps driving Agile (Gartner) and increasing competition between Platform Vendor services between AWS, GCS and Azure as well as the new wild card entry AliBaba. Interestingly, growth rates for all of these services are in the 50-90% p.a. area. Contino also mentioned that there are many new developments not just in the area of containerisation and serverless computing, but also in improved cloud security via projects such as Calico.

Surprisingly, given the recent frenzies, most commentators were muted on the impact of AI and Machine learning. Likewise, no one bothered to mention the rapidly maturing area of wearable technology or the new promises that quantum computing may at last start to deliver.

Overall, the impression is of Lean Digital becoming mainstream whilst other post digital technologies gradually insinuate themselves into leading edge enterprises.

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