Top Trends Shaping Digital Transformation in 2022

A recent realization is that business operations and the workforce can easily get disrupted overnight. Digital transformation is the holy grail for optimizing the business’s operations and fueling growth in the existing and the rising new markets. Missing digital transformation means putting the development of an organization in jeopardy.

In exhaustive research done by Mulesoft, the significant hindrances that organizations face these days include hybrid experiences, hyper-automation, a surge of information, and dispersed environments.

The Top Trends Shaping Digital Transformation

1. The Future of work will depend extensively on Linked, Hybrid Experiences.

Along with the swiftly changing workplace environment, employee expectations have grown many folds. It has compelled organizations to provide digital-first and connected first experiences to fuel high performance and productivity, thus retaining the talent.

2. The Growth of Composable Organizations

With an increasing pressure to Innovate, the organizations will integrate greater agility leading to an enhanced drive for composable and event-driven architectures.

3. The Rise of the Business Technologist

Growing digitalization pressure on companies will put the position of business technologists in an essential place in the IT department, as they will play a crucial role in innovation.

4. Hyper Automation unfurls the Digital Value and Potential.

Hyper Automation will open the door to efficiency, accelerate the time to market, and transform the employee and customer experiences.

5. Security by Default is inevitable

Security by Default will become necessary as organizations will learn about the security of their applications because they’re only as secure as the composable blocks they’re built on.

6. Increase in Intricacies because of the Hybrid and Distributed Ecosystem

With the acceptance of hybrid and multi-clouds in the digital world, there’s a need to find a universal way of integrating and managing these environments. It will play an essential role in the success of the digital transformation.

7. A single source of reality ends up being crucial to the data-driven organization.

A vast amount of data is being driven by digitization; an increasing number of organizations will look for a single source of truth where consumers can get access to the right kind of data in the proper context at the right time.

The most exciting takeaways on Trends Shaping the Digital Transformation are:

A. The Future of work will depend extensively on Linked, Hybrid Experiences.

A study by Gartner suggests that between the years 2019 and 2021, a surge of 44 percent was seen in the use of collaboration platforms alone. Also, McKinsey stated that more than 20 percent of the skilled workforce worldwide, mainly those in high skilled roles in verticals such as finance, insurance, and IT, worked productively, even after being away from the office for a long time. Automation will play a crucial role in a hybrid and linked work environment in the era of digitization. It’ll become essential to use low code techniques, which has been determined by 42 percent of the users as vital to their ability to create a well connected and linked employee experience.

Some essential facts and stats around the use of Automation for the creation of a better-linked employee experience are:

• To create better-linked employee experiences, 30 percent of organizations have given the go-ahead to automation initiatives.
• Close to 44 percent of organizations have implemented automation initiatives to create connected experiences.
• Improving operational efficiency (54 percent), enhancing productivity (49 percent), and creation of superior-connected experiences (41 percent) are amongst the top automation priorities for 2022.
• The process changes (66 percent) and technology (49 percent) are amongst the top digital transformation investment priorities to ensure effective collaboration of the teams in 2021.

B. The Growth of Composable Organizations

According to a study conducted by MuleSoft, the coming 2020s period will be a time of seamless and hassle-free digital experiences. To turn this vision into a reality, organizations will have to devise a plan to drive incremented and enhanced agility leading to a new dawn of event-driven architectures and composable businesses in 2022.

A problem that needs quick attention is that a growing digital economy brings immense pressure for organizations to sort things right for the end-user ultimately. According to a study done by PwC, one in three customers will abandon a brand they prefer after a single bad experience. The most effective way for an organization to promote and enhance agility and to meet these abruptly rising expectations is by becoming an efficient composable business built on reusable APIs. This step is unavoidable for converting the organization’s digital tendencies and data into a trail of reusable, interchangeable building blocks to create an appropriate solution.

An excellent example of a connected and composable model is the Future of digital commerce. Gartner has defined it as the “Composable Enterprise”, along with the composable commerce as the apt expression of this particular idea diligently applied to the shopping infrastructure. The true meaning of composable business is creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.

The main idea behind the operation of a composable business includes four basic principles:

1. Increased speed through better discovery
2. Enhanced agility with better modularity
3. Effective leadership through orchestration
4. Resilience through autonomy

Close to 96 percent of organizations worldwide use either public or private APIs because reusable APIs are one of the most effective ways to achieve the desired goal.

Essential concepts and differentiation with APIs are identified with the help of research with a focus on event-driven APIs and architectures. Ultimately, it is concluded by the research that the event-driven architectures are more likely to be flexible and extensible in comparison to their sluggish counterparts, lending staunch support to the fluid, real-time interactions expected by consumers in the current scenario.

1. Four out of five organizations recognize the need to make data and integration easily accessible to users for enhanced productivity, deliver closely connected experiences, and drive innovation.
2. Thirty-six percent of the organizations reckon they follow a mature approach for enabling non-IT users to integrate apps and data sources easily through the APIs seamlessly.
3. Forty-four percent of organizations are creating plans to aid non-IT users to integrate the apps and data sources through the APIs.

According to Gartner, the primary building blocks of a composable business are:

1. The thing that keeps you from losing your creativity is composable business. Anything is composable. If certain factors are combined with composable thinking, like the principles of modularity, discovery and autonomy, orchestration, etc, it should be able to guide your approach to conceptualizing the composition and when it should be done.
2. An architecture of this type ensures the flexibility and resilience of your organization. It’s about structure and purpose. The basics that provide you with the mechanisms used in your business architecture include these structural capabilities.
3. Composable technologies are the tools that lead today and would lead tomorrow. They are the pieces of the riddles, which connect them all.

C. The Rise of the Business Technologist

According to a study by MuleSoft, the doubled volume of digital initiatives because of the pandemic made it more cumbersome for already stretched teams to live up to the needs of the current business models. In 2022, consistent work with IT teams will relieve some of the pressure to keep up with the current technologies to accelerate innovation.

According to Gartner, the organizations that aid and successfully arm the business technologists with the right resources are 2.6 times more likely to increment the digital business outcomes.

According to Gartner, by 2022, 80 percent of the technology products and services will be created by those who aren’t a part of the technology ecosystem.

The leading technologies include low or almost no-code approaches and AI-assisted development tools. Gartner discovered that 77 percent of business technologists consistently use a combination of specific technologies, including Automation, integration, AI, Data Science, Application development, etc., in their daily routine.

Close to 80% of business users approve that if specific data and IT capabilities were available and easily discoverable in packaged business capabilities (PBCs), they could create tailored solutions and deliver digital projects faster along with their colleagues. Out of them, 36 percent state that they follow a comparatively mature approach to enable non-IT users to integrate applications and data sources through APIs flawlessly. By 2024, the ones not a part of the technology ecosystem would create close to 80 percent of technology products and services.

According to a study performed by Gartner, on an average, close to 41 percent of employees outside of the IT field including the business technologists do the customization or building of data or technology solutions. Gartner also reckons that by the end of 2025, most of the low-code clients will come from business buyers that are specifically not a part of an IT organization.

D. The Digital Value and Potential is truly unfurled by HyperAutomation

Rather than being used in piecemeal projects, Automation will act as a driving force, which would be fundamental for the functioning of a modern digital enterprise. The main focus of Hyper Automation is to scale Automation throughout the enterprise by reusing various processes and deploying several integrated technology capabilities like low or no-code platforms, ML (machine learning), and robotic process automation (RPA). As predicted by the analysts, from 2020, this market will grow by 24 percent. It would be worth close to $600 billion by the year-end because the organizations look forward to identifying and automating as many processes as possible and in the fastest manner possible.

According to Deloitte, 93% of the top businesses are expected to use RPA by 2023.

Research done in 2021 shows that the decentralization of businesses will be accelerated with the advent of Automation and a new capabilities strategy. The customer service area is a business that’ll see tremendous growth with the coming of hyper-automation.

It has been a challenging year for the employees involved in customer service. There has been a significant increase in case volume and complexity without increasing headcount and budget. The solution that would provide the most sought-after workflow automation would indeed be a respite. Close to 77 percent of the agents acknowledge that automating the daily routine tasks allows them to concentrate on more complex tasks.

One of the most famous and successful examples of service automation getting a lot of hype is chatbots. At present, 83 percent of customers expect immediate response while contacting a company, increasing from 78 percent in 2019.

E. Security by Default is inevitable

One of the most inevitable and frequent roadblocks on digital initiatives is the security concern. Close to 87 percent of IT leaders acknowledge that the concerns related to security have been slowing down the pace of innovation. While the other lot, consisting of 73 percent, state that there has been a security and governance concern because of the systems becoming more integrated.

According to Gartner, By 2022, one of the most frequent attack vectors would include APIs, thus leading to data breaches in enterprise web applications.

What are the distinguishing features of a truly data-driven business? It’s mainly dependent on the appropriate use of the insights obtained from AI-powered analytics to transform the business processes. The ultimate goal is to enhance the business outcomes by incrementing revenues and thus success. According to a study done by Accenture, an annual growth of close to 30 percent has been observed by truly data-driven organizations.

The major trends that have been instrumental in shaping the digital transformation in 2022 include data explosion, hyper-automation, hybrid experiences, distributed environments, etc. Comprehensive research by MuleSoft recommends these steps to IT leaders and businesses for improved collaboration and faster execution:

1. Enabling the IT organizations with the right kind of resources and tools for delivery of composable services, API products, and bots at scale for the organization.
2. Encouraging and supporting the business teams for automated integrations using low/no-code by making appropriate use of IT’s assets that can be reused along with support and governance.
3. Automation of the tasks that are repetitive, including the manual tasks with the bots that are reusable and composable, and which can also intelligently process documents, ease data entry, or take appropriate actions on the behalf of users, without code.

Conclusion

In 2022, to be a rising and successful data-driven organization, there is a need to break down the silos through the enterprise to create a single source of truth. Business leaders can indeed look forward to machine learning and data analytics to make sense of all their data for comparatively enhanced decision-making.