2022 Tech Trends

Enabling the digital economy

Supporting the CEO for growth

The post-pandemic pace of change

The disruptions to the way we work caused by the pandemic haven’t bounced back to normal.

As part of its research process for the 2022 Tech Trends Report, Info-Tech Research Group conducted an open online survey among its membership and wider community of professionals. The survey was fielded from August 2021 through to September 2021, collecting 475 responses. We asked some of the same questions as last year’s survey so we can compare results as well as new questions to explore new trends.

How much do you expect your organization to change permanently compared to how it was operating before the pandemic?

• 7% – No change. We'll keep doing business as we always have.
• 33% – A bit of change. Some ways of working will shift long term
• 47% – A lot of change. The way we work will be differ in many ways long term. But our business remains...
• 13% – Transformative change. Our fundamental business will be different and we'll be working in new ways.

This year, about half of IT professionals expect a lot of change to the way we work and 13% expect a transformative change with a fundamental shift in their business. Last year, the same percentage expected a lot of change and only 10% expected transformative change.

30% more professionals expect transformative permanent change compared to one year ago.

47% of professionals expect a lot of permanent change; this remains the same as last year. (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

The pandemic accelerated the speed of digital transformation

With the massive disruption preventing people from gathering, businesses shifted to digital interactions with customers.

Companies also accelerated the pace of creating digital or digitally enhanced products and services.

“The Digital Economy incorporates all economic activity reliant on or significantly enhanced by the use of digital inputs, including digital technologies, digital infrastructure, digital services and data.” (OECD Definition)

IT must enable participation in the digital economy

Consumer spending is tilting more digital.

Consumers have cut back spending on sectors where purchases are mostly made offline. That spending has shifted to digital services and online purchases. New habits formed during the pandemic are likely to stick for many consumers, with a continued shift to online consumption for many sectors.

Purchases on online platforms are projected to rise from 10% today to 33% by 2030.

Estimated online share of consumption

Changing customer expectations pose a risk.

IT practitioners agree that customer expectations are changing. They expect this to be more likely to disrupt their business in the next 12 months than new competition, cybersecurity incidents, or government-enacted policy changes.

Factors likely to disrupt business in next 12 months

This poses a challenge to IT departments below the “expand” level of maturity

CIOs must climb the maturity ladder to help CEOs drive growth.

Most IT departments rated their maturity in the “optimize” or “support” level on Info-Tech’s maturity ladder.

CIOs at the “optimize” level can play a role in digital transformation by improving back-office processes but should aim for a higher mandate.

CIOs achieving at the “expand” level can help directly improve revenues by improving customer-facing products and services, and those at the “transform” level can help fundamentally change the business to create revenue in new ways. CIOs can climb the maturity ladder by enabling new digital capabilities.

Maturity is heading in the wrong direction.

Only half of IT practitioners described their department’s maturity as “transform” compared to last year’s survey, and more than twice the number rated themselves as “struggle.”

48% rate their IT departments as low maturity.

Improve maturity by focusing on key capabilities to compete in the digital economy

Capabilities to unlock digital

Innovation: Identify innovation opportunities and plan how to use technology innovation to create a competitive advantage or achieve improved operational effectiveness and efficiency.

Human Resources Management: Provide a structured approach to ensure optimal planning, evaluation, and development of human resources.

Data Architecture: Manage the business’ data stores, including technology, governance, and people that manage them. Establish guidelines for the effective use of data.

Security Strategy: Define, operate, and monitor a system for information security management. Keep the impact and occurrence of information security incidents within risk appetite levels.

Business Process Controls and Internal Audit: Manage business process controls such as self-assessments and independent assurance reviews to ensure information related to and used by business processes meets security and integrity requirements. (ISACA, 2020)

5 Tech Trends for 2022

In this report, we explore five use cases for emerging technology that can improve on capabilities needed to compete in the digital economy. Use cases combine emerging technologies with new processes and strategic planning.

DIGITAL ECONOMY

TREND 01 | Human Resources Management

HYBRID COLLABORATION
Provide a digital employee experience that is flexible, contextual, and free from the friction of hybrid operating models.

TREND 02 | Security Strategy

BATTLE AGAINST RANSOMWARE
Prevent ransomware infections and create a response plan for a worst-case scenario. Collaborate with relevant external partners to access resources and mitigate risks.

TREND 03 | Business Process Controls and Internal Audit

CARBON METRICS IN ENERGY 4.0
Use internet of things (IoT) and auditable tracking to provide insight into business process implications for greenhouse gas emissions.

TREND 04 | Data Architecture

INTANGIBLE VALUE CREATION
Provide governance around digital marketplace and manage implications of digital currency. Use blockchain technology to turn unique intellectual property into saleable digital products

TREND 05 | Innovation

AUTOMATION AS A SERVICE
Automate business processes and access new sophisticated technology services through platform integration.

Hybrid Collaboration

TREND 01 | HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Provide a digital employee experience that is flexible, contextual, and free from the friction of hybrid operating models.

Emerging technologies:
Intelligent conference rooms; intelligent workflows, platforms

Introduction

Hybrid work models enable productive, diverse, and inclusive talent ecosystems necessary for the digital economy.

Hybrid work models have become the default post-pandemic work approach as most knowledge workers prefer the flexibility to choose whether to work remotely or come into the office. CIOs have an opportunity lead hybrid work by facilitating collaboration between employees mixed between meeting at the office and virtually.

IT departments rose to the challenge to quickly facilitate an all-remote work scenario for their organizations at the outset of the pandemic. Now they must adapt again to facilitate the hybrid work model, which brings new friction to collaboration but also new opportunities to hire a talented, engaged, and diverse workforce.

79% of organizations will have a mix of workers in the office and at home. (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

35% view role type as a determining factor in the feasibility of the hybrid work model.

Return-to-the-office tensions

Only 18% of employees want to return to the office full-time.

But 70% of employers want people back in the office. (CNBC, April 2021)

Signals

IT delivers the systems needed to make the hybrid operating model a success.

IT has an opportunity to lead by defining the hybrid operating model through technology that enables collaboration. To foster collaboration, companies plan to invest in the same sort of tools that helped them cope during the pandemic.

As 79% of organizations envision a hybrid model going forward, investments into hybrid work tech stacks – including web conferencing tools, document collaboration tools, and team workspaces – are expected to continue into 2022.

Plans for future investment in collaboration technologies

Drivers

COVID-19

Vaccination rates around the world are rising and allowing more offices to welcome back workers because the risk of COVID-19 transmission is reduced and jurisdictions are lifting restrictions limiting gatherings.

Worker satisfaction

Most workers don't want to go to the office full-time. In a Bloomberg poll (2021), almost half of millennial and Gen Z workers say they would quit their job if not given an option to work remotely.

IT spending

Companies are investing more into IT budgets to find ways to support a mix of remote work and in-office resources to cope with work disruption. This extra spending is offset in some cases by companies saving money from having employees work from home some portion of the time. (CIO Dive, 2021)

Risks and Benefits

Benefits

Risks

“We have to be careful what we automate. Do we want to automate waste? If a company is accustomed to having a ton of meetings and their mode in the new world is to move that online, what are you going to do? You're going to end up with a lot of fatigue and disenchantment…. You have to rethink your methods before you think about the automation part of it." (Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer, Zoho)

Listen to the Tech Insights podcast: Unique approach to hybrid collaboration

Case Study: Zoho

Situation

Zoho Corp. is a cloud software firm based in Chennai, India. It develops a wide range of cloud software, including enterprise collaboration software and productivity tools. Over the past decade, Zoho has used flexible work models to grant remote work options to some employees.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, not only did the office have to shut down but also many employees had to relocate back with families in rural areas. The human costs of the pandemic experienced by staff required Zoho to respond by offering counseling services and material support to employees.

Complication

Zoho prides itself as an employee-centric company and views its culture as a community that's purpose goes beyond work. That sense of community was lost because of the disruption caused by the pandemic. Employees lost their social context and their work role models. Zoho had to find a way to recreate that without the central hub of the office or find a way to work with the limitations of it not being possible.

Resolution

To support employees in rural settings, Zoho sent out phones to provide redundant bandwidth. As lockdowns in India end, Zoho is taking a flexible approach and giving employees the option to come to the office. It's seeing more people come back each week, drawn by the strong community.

Zoho supports the hybrid mix of workers by balancing synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It holds meetings when absolutely necessary through tools like Zoho Meet but tries to keep more work context to asynchronous collaboration that allows people to complete tasks quickly and move on. Its applications are connected to a common platform that is designed to facilitate workflows between employees with context and intelligence. (Interview with Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer, Zoho)

“We tend to think of it on a continuum of synchronous to asynchronous work collaboration. It’s become the paramount norm for so many different reasons…the point is people are going to work at different times in different locations. So how do we enable experiences where everyone can participate?" (Jason Brommet, Head of Modern Work and Security Business Group at Microsoft)

Listen to the Tech Insights podcast: Microsoft on the ‘paradox of hybrid work’

Case Study: Microsoft

Situation

Before the pandemic, only 18% of Microsoft employees were working remotely. As of April 1, 2020, they were joined by the other 82% of non-essential workers at the company in working remotely.

As with its own customers, Microsoft used its own software to enable this new work experience, including Microsoft Teams for web conferencing and instant messaging and Office 365 for document collaboration. Employees proved just as productive getting their work done from home as they were working in the office.

Complication

At Microsoft, the effects of firm-wide remote work changed the collaboration patterns of the company. Even though a portion of the company was working remotely before the pandemic, the effects of everyone working remotely were different. Employees collaborated in a more static and siloed way, focusing on scheduled meetings with existing relationships. Fewer connections were made with more disparate parts of the organization. There was also a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication.

Resolution

Microsoft is creating new tools to break down the silos in organizations that are grappling with hybrid work challenges. For example, Viva Insights is designed to inform workers about their collaboration habits with analytics. Microsoft wants to provide workers with insights on their collaborative networks and whether they are creating new connections or deepening existing connections. (Interview with Jason Brommet, Head of Modern Work and Security Business Group, Microsoft; Nature Human Behaviour, 2021)

What's Next?

Distributed collaboration space:

International Workplace Group says that more companies are taking advantage of its full network deals on coworking spaces. Companies such as Standard Charter are looking to provide their workers with a happy compromise between working from home and making the commute all the way to the central office. The hub-and-spoke model gives employees the opportunity to work near home and looks to be part of the hybrid operating model mix for many companies. (Interview with Wayne Berger, CEO of IWG Canada & Latin America)

Optimized hybrid meetings:

Facilitating hybrid meetings between employees grouped in the office and remote workers will be a major pain point. New hybrid meeting solutions will provide cameras embedded with intelligence to put boardroom participants into independent video streams. They will also focus on making connecting to the same meeting from various locations as convenient as possible and capture clear and crisp audio from each speaker.

Uncertainties

Mix between office and remote work:

It's clear we're not going to work the way we used to previously with central work hubs, but full-on remote work isn't the right path forward either. A new hybrid work model is emerging, and organizations are experimenting to find the right approach.

Attrition:

Between April and September 2021, 15 million US workers quit their jobs, setting a record pace. Employees seek a renewed sense of purpose in their work, and many won’t accept mandates to go back to the office. (McKinsey, 2021)

Equal footing in meetings:

What are the new best practices for conducting an effective meeting between employees in the office and those who are remote? Some companies ask each employee to connect via a laptop. Others are using conference rooms with tech to group in-office workers together and connect them with remote workers.

Hybrid Collaboration Scenarios

Organizations can plan their response to the hybrid work context by plotting their circumstances across two continuums: synchronous to asynchronous collaboration approach and remote work to central hub work model.

Recommendations

Rethink technology solutions. Don't expect your pre-pandemic videoconference rooms to suffice. And consider how to optimize your facilities and infrastructure for hot-desking scenarios.

Optimize remote work. Shift from the collaboration approach you put together just to get by to the program you'll use to maximize flexibility.

Enable effective collaboration. Enable knowledge sharing no matter where and when your employees work and choose the best collaboration software solutions for your scenario.

Run better meetings. Successful hybrid workplace plans must include planning around hybrid meetings. Seamless hybrid meetings are the result of thoughtful planning and documented best practices.

89% of organizations invested in web conferencing technology to facilitate better collaboration, but only 43% invested in office meeting room solutions. (Info-Tech Tech Trends 2022 Survey)

Info-Tech Resources

• Rethink Technology Solutions
• Optimize Remote Work
• Enable Effective Collaboration
• Run Better Meetings

Battle Against Ransomware

TREND 02 | SECURITY STRATEGY

Prevent ransomware infections and create a response plan for a worst-case scenario. Collaborate with relevant external partners to access resources and mitigate risks.

Emerging technologies:
Open source intelligence; AI-powered threat detection