Paul Hampton, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Alfresco shares his top predictions for this year
Rich content will overtake documents
The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words,” will hold especially true in 2020 as rich media content like videos and images become increasingly prevalent in modern businesses. How people consume information is drastically changing and is reflected in how they interact with organizations. We’ll see a huge increase in the exchange and sharing of rich media between businesses and customers to simplify and expedite their experiences. For example, customers sharing dash cam footage and a photograph of the damage to a car with an insurance agency following an accident. In 2020, expect that rich media will surpass all of the traditional content created to date, posing new challenges for how enterprises manage and regulate more complicated content.
Content will increase tenfold
With the rise of rich media and growing number of business applications, the amount of content will increase at least tenfold. As the volume increases, organizations will face a challenge in trying to understand the information they’re responsible for. Already, we’re seeing organizations unable to effectively grasp their vast content sources, an issue that will become a bigger concern as the content grows in volume and complexity.
Security
Enterprises will need to solve for dark data
Simply put, dark data is information, often personal information, that enterprises have, but don’t realize they have. Dark data encompasses unstructured data, which Gartner predicts will encompass 80% of all global data by 2022, and is often stored in silos, network file stores and unregulated tools across an organization. With new data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, there will be an increased urgency for organizations to get a handle on their dark data. Until they do, I expect to see more organizations getting hit with serious fines for not protecting their information.
Blockchain will play a bigger role in privacy
Blockchain will become more pervasive for business applications. Within data privacy and security, there are countless applications that could benefit from blockchain. For example, a healthcare organization utilizing blockchain to manage the authentication of patient records. It removes the potential for human error and ensures a completely secure process.
Millennial preferences cause a growing IT issue
Younger workers are rejecting traditional enterprise technology in favor of their own tools. Many IT leaders are already concerned with the practice, often referred to as Shadow IT, and in the coming year, the issue will escalate to business leadership. Employees using rogue tools unvalidated by IT professionals puts the entire organization and its customers at risk. It’s an extremely important issue that shows no sign of improving as more young workers climb the corporate ladder.
Digital Enterprise
Hype technology will bring value
The technologies that have previously delivered more hype than value will start to come to fruition. There will be a democratization of artificial intelligence technology, allowing more and more people to actually start driving significant business value from using the technology to solve business problems. Within the data space, AI will be critical in helping companies understand the information they have. Furthermore, it will dictate what information is valuable and what can be removed. No longer will organizations need to waste time, money and effort storing use less information ‘just in case’.
Digitization will start with process
Organizations making digital investments will increasingly start with process. The most valuable investments always directly connect to the customer. Thus, digital transformations should begin by evaluating the customer journey. What processes are part of that journey? And how can these be improved to provide exceptional experiences for the customer. That’s where the most valuable digital transformation will begin.
Democratization of technology
As new technologies, that were once complex – needing a data scientist to understand, become more accessible, there will be a democratization of these technologies. Consider the fact that there used to be typists when typewriters were the new, latest technologies. We’ll one day look at certain data science roles as we do typists. Employees across an organization will become more familiar and knowledgeable with artificial intelligence and machine learning so that very niche technology job roles will go the way of the typing pools of old.
About the Author
Paul Hampton, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Alfresco. I am currently the Marketing Director for Northern Europe (which includes the UK, Ireland, Benelux and Nordic regions) and have spent over 23 years in the IT industry. I have been at Ariba for four and half years carrying out a number of different marketing related activities (Product Marketing, Product Management and Field Marketing). Prior to this I spent over six years at Documentum and helped to launch EMEA operations, growing the company to over 200 strong within Europe. Prior to this I managed the pre-sales team at Interleaf, a desktop publishing vendor for four years.
SOURCE:Paper.li