Gartner announced the top ten strategic technology development trends that will have a significant impact on most corporate organizations in 2021.
The first three strategic technology development trends explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (machine learning) will penetrate into almost any field, and represent a main battlefield for technology providers in the next five years. The next four trends focused on mixing the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive, digitally enhanced environment. The last three trends refer to the use of ever-expanding connections between people and businesses, as well as equipment, content, and services to achieve digital business results.
David Cearley, vice president and academician analyst at Gartner, said: “Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2021 are closely related to Intelligent Digital Mesh. Intelligent Digital Mesh is the future. The foundation of digital business and ecosystems. IT leaders must consider these technological trends when formulating innovation strategies, otherwise they will face the risk of retreat.”
Trend 1: Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AI Foundation)
Until 2025, the ability to use artificial intelligence to help decision-making, reshape business models and ecosystems, and rebuild customer experience will be a key driving force for the success of digital programs.
Cearley believes: “Artificial intelligence technology is evolving rapidly, and companies must invest heavily in skills, processes and tools in order to successfully use these technologies to build artificial intelligence-enhanced systems. Investment areas may include data preparation, integration, algorithms, and selection training. Methods and modeling.”
Trend 2: Intelligent Apps and Analytics (Intelligent Apps and Analytics)
In the next few years, almost any application and service will adopt a certain degree of artificial intelligence. Some of these applications will become truly intelligent applications. Without artificial intelligence and machine learning, these applications would not exist. Others will potentially use artificial intelligence to provide intelligence from behind the scenes. Intelligent applications set up a new intelligent middle layer between humans and systems, which is expected to change the nature of work and the structure of the workplace.
Cearley said: “It should be used as a way to enhance human activities when exploring intelligent applications, rather than simply replacing humans. Enhanced analytics is a particularly strategic and gradually evolving field. It faces a wide range of business users, Operational workers and private data scientists use machine learning to automatically complete data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing.”
In the vast software and service market, artificial intelligence has become the next key area, including all aspects of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Packaged software and service providers should indicate how they will use artificial intelligence to add commercial value to the new version through advanced analysis, intelligent processes, and advanced user experience.
Trend 3: Intelligent Things (Intelligent Things)
Smart objects are physical objects that abandon rigorous programming models and instead use artificial intelligence to achieve advanced behaviors and interact with the surrounding environment and humans more naturally. Artificial intelligence is vigorously promoting the progress of new smart objects (such as autonomous vehicles, robots and drones) and bringing stronger functions to many existing objects (such as the Internet of Things connected to consumer and industrial systems).
Cearley believes: “At present, autonomous vehicles (automobile vehicles) used in controlled environments (such as farming and mining) are an area of rapid growth in smart objects. By 2022, we may witness the limited, An example of driving on a controllable and clearly defined road. However, the driver may be a necessary condition for the popularization of autonomous vehicles to prevent unexpected technical failures. At least in the next five years, we predict that semi-autonomous vehicles that require a driver will Dominate. During this period, manufacturers will test technology more rigorously, and non-technical issues such as legal and regulatory issues and cultural acceptance will also be resolved.”
Trend 4: Digital Twin (Digital Twin)
Digital twin refers to the digital representation of real entities or systems. In the next three to five years, digital twins in the context of Internet of Things projects have a particularly bright future and are currently leading people’s interest in digital twins. A well-designed digital twin of assets is expected to greatly improve corporate decision-making. These digital twins are associated with their real counterparts and are used to understand the state of objects or systems, respond to changes, improve operations, and increase value. First, organizations will simply implement digital twins, and then continue to improve them over time to improve their ability to collect data, reflect correct data, apply correct analysis and rules, and effectively respond to business goals.
Cearley said: “Over time, the digital representation of almost every aspect of our world will be dynamically linked to its true counterparts. In addition, they will also be linked to each other and incorporate artificial intelligence-based functions to achieve advanced simulation, operation and analysis. Urban planners, digital marketers, healthcare professionals, and industrial planners will all benefit from this long-term shift to an integrated digital twin world.”
Trend 5: From Cloud to the Edge
Edge computing describes a computing topology in which information processing, content collection, and delivery are all done near the source of such information. Connection and latency challenges, bandwidth limitations, and more powerful features embedded at the edge all support distributed models. Companies should start to use edge design patterns in their infrastructure architectures—especially for companies with a large number of IoT elements.
Although many people regard the cloud and the edge as a competitive method, the cloud is actually a computing method. In this case, elastically scalable technical functions are delivered in the form of services, and there is no inherent need for a centralized model.
Cearley pointed out: “When considering the concept of complementarity, the cloud can be used as a technical way to create a service-oriented model and a centralized control and collaboration structure, while the edge is used as a delivery method to execute various cloud services in discrete or distributed processes. Link.”
Trend 6: Conversational Platforms
In terms of human interaction with the digital world, conversational platforms will promote the next major paradigm shift. The burden of interpreting intent is transferred from the user to the computer. The platform receives questions or commands from users, and then responds by performing certain functions, displaying certain content, or asking for more input information. In the next few years, the conversational interface will become a primary design goal for user interaction, and it will be realized through dedicated hardware, core operating system features, platforms and applications.
Cearley believes: “Conversational platforms have reached a critical point in terms of understanding language and basic user intent, but there are still shortcomings. The challenge for conversational platforms is that users must communicate in a very structured way, which is usually It’s a disappointing experience. The robustness of the conversational model, the application programming interface (API) and event model for accessing, invoking, and coordinating third-party services to deliver complex results are the main differentiating elements between various conversational platforms. “
Trend 7: Immersive Experience (Immersive Experience)
Conversational interfaces are changing the way people control the digital world, while virtual, augmented and mixed reality (virtual, augmented and mixed reality) is changing the way people observe and interact with the digital world. At present, the virtual reality and augmented reality market is still immature and still in a fragmented stage. However, people’s interest in this field is very strong, which has given birth to many novel virtual reality applications such as video games and 360-degree dome video. However, the commercial value of these advanced entertainment applications is currently minimal. In order to promote the realization of real tangible business benefits, companies must examine the real scenes of specific virtual reality and augmented reality applications to improve employee work efficiency and optimize design, training, and visualization processes.
As an immersive experience type that integrates and expands the functions of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, mixed reality emerges at the historic moment. As a special immersive experience, this technology is very attractive because it optimizes the interface to better match the way people observe and interact with the world. Mixed reality spans a huge range, including head-mounted displays for augmented or virtual reality, as well as smart phones, tablet-based augmented reality and environmental sensor applications. Mixed reality represents the scope for people to observe and interact with the digital world.
Trend 8: Blockchain
Blockchain is changing from a digital currency infrastructure to a digital platform. Blockchain technology is completely different from the existing centralized transaction and recording mechanism, and can be used as the foundation for existing enterprises and startups to develop disruptive digital businesses. Although the publicity about blockchain is concentrated in the financial service industry, blockchain also has potential applications in other fields, such as government departments, healthcare, manufacturing, media publishing, identification, ownership registration services, and supply chains. Wait. Although the prospect of blockchain is considerable and will undoubtedly bring subversive effects, the prospect of blockchain is better than the reality of blockchain, and many related technologies will not mature in the next two to three years.
Trend 9: Event Driven
The core of digital business revolves around the following concept: companies are always highly sensitive and ready to explore and utilize new digital business moments. A business event can be anything expressed in numbers, reflecting an obvious new state or state change, such as completing an order or landing an airplane. With the help of event agents, Internet of Things, cloud computing, blockchain, memory data management and artificial intelligence, people can more quickly discover business events and perform more detailed analysis. However, without cultural and leadership changes, technology itself cannot realize the full value of the event-driven model. Digital business urges IT leaders, planners and architects to actively adopt event thinking based on their own needs.
Trend 10: Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust (Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust)
In order to ensure that digital business plans can be effectively implemented in the face of advanced targeted attacks, security and risk management leaders must adopt a continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) approach to achieve an adaptive response based on risk and trust Real-time decision-making. The security infrastructure must be adaptive everywhere in order to better take advantage of opportunities and manage risks to ensure that security can keep up with the speed of digital business.
As part of continuous adaptive risk and trust assessments, organizations must overcome barriers between security teams and application teams, just as DevOps tools and processes bridge the gap between development and operations. Information security architects should try to integrate security testing into the DevOps workflow from multiple points of collaboration. In this process, they must cooperate with developers in a very transparent manner and maintain DevOps teamwork, agility and speed, and development The flexibility of the environment to achieve “DevSecOps”. At runtime, continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment can also be used in conjunction with deception technology. Technological advancements such as virtualization and software-defined networking have made it easier to deploy, manage, and monitor “adaptive honeypot technology,” which is a fundamental part of network trapping.