Digital transformation has moved beyond optional to a mandatory business activity.
Once a concern for early adopters and state-of-the-art organizations, digital transformation has gone mainstream and like any mainstream movement, it includes multiple sub-movements, or trends. While some of these trends are on everyone’s lips right now, many of them are becoming old hat.
Below is a list of trends that, for better or worse, aren’t quite catching on in 2018.
A cloud-first approach
For years, rethinking a company’s digital infrastructure meant shifting to the cloud. That’s not necessarily the proper approach for everybody and many experts are now saying the days of a cloud-first strategy have come and gone. In fact, companies shifting to the cloud now should be asking themselves what has taken them so long.
Instead, companies are using a combination of cloud and on-premises solutions. For quite a while, people felt they couldn’t shift to the cloud due to security issues, the sensitivity of their data or due to concerns around committing to a provider. On the flip side, cloud advocates preached about all the benefits companies would reap if they shifted to the cloud, including decreased costs and better scalability.
We’re past the stage where one approach is fantastic and the other is horrible. Businesses want a solution that addresses flexibility, security, cost and speed. Sometimes that points to a cloud solution and sometimes it points to an on-premises solution.
Multiple collaboration tools
If you’re using Trello to share files, Slack to have group conversations and Google Docs to collaborate on documents, you might be starting to get collab-app fatigue, and you’re not alone. The heady early days of collaboration apps are over and companies are now settling on using one, possibly two platforms.
Many experts are saying that Google and Microsoft are getting enormous traction in collaboration and communication tools. Meanwhile, there’s been a serious dropoff in the adoption of new collaborations tools.
DIY IoT platforms
The early days of the Internet of Things (IoT) are behind us and as more ready-to-use IoT platforms come to market, companies are shifting away from their ad hoc, DIY platforms.
These new and promising IoT platforms permit businesses to get to market more rapidly, at a lower price and with a richer group of features.
Moreover, effective implementation of IoT is now a high priority. The degree of IoT deployment has shifted from watching and figuring out mid- or large-scale trials in some businesses or embedding of IoT into core offerings in other companies.
Mobile-first
A handful of several years back, a lot of companies were trying to create their software to be mobile-first. The theory was that everything would shift to mobile in a handful of short years, essentially making conventional computers and tools outdated.
In the same way, people anticipated tablets to take off as the new approach to doing business because they were portable, powerful and fairly easy to use. Experts are now seeing this trend invert, as software has come back to a desktop-first model, looking at mobile and tablet apps second.
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