Deloitte's 13th Annual Tech Trends Report: As Enterprises Navigate Abundance of Advances and Challenges Driven by COVID-19, Engineering a Tech-Forward Future is an Imperative

NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

Key takeaways

• Tech Trends 2022 chronicles automation as the emerging key to both sustaining and enhancing operations, while empowering workers.
• Report explores seven trends likely to impact businesses in the next 18 to 24 months.
• COVID-19-induced technology transformation is prompting organizations to engineer the "next normal."

Why this matters
Building on resilience from the initial response to the COVID-19 crisis, the 13^th annual "Deloitte Tech Trends Report" finds that pioneering organizations are continuing to challenge orthodoxies by automating, abstracting and outsourcing business processes to increasingly powerful technology such as cloud, security and data in an environment of extreme uncertainty.

For most enterprises, the impacts of COVID-19 expedited digital transformation initiatives from years to months — in some cases, even weeks. As organizations move to apply these nimble approaches and digitally accelerate to address today's business challenges ranging from talent and skills shortages to global supply chain issues, Deloitte's Tech Trends 2022 shows that by working smarter, organizations can shift their focus to driving innovation, gaining an advantage and differentiating themselves both inside and outside the enterprise. The report explores the opportunities, strategies and tools that are emerging to engineer a tech-enabled future.

Key quotes
"In Tech Trends 2022, we are helping guide enterprises to shift their mindsets from betting on the future to building the future. Our teams around the globe are sensing, scouting and scanning emerging technologies, and this report distills the vast advances across technology domains into a handful of specific investments that can help transform business and government missions. Especially with the unexpected change and continued resiliency needed with COVID-19, Tech Trends 2022 can help shape the future by encouraging businesses to think bigger, while driving real action and impact — smaller, incrementally, but to profound effect." 

     – Bill Briggs, global chief technology officer and principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

"In responding to COVID-19, CIOs, CTOs and IT leaders have challenged the status quo and proved how much can be achieved when impediments to productivity are removed. With these initial learnings, IT must advance the future with next-generation technologies and revenue streams, and improve processes internally to empower technology talent to solve higher-value problems."

     – Scott Buchholz, emerging technology research managing director, and government and public services chief technology officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

"Today's leaders face enormous challenges in planning for the future amid extreme uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. In parallel, AI, cloud, data, robotics and other technological advances are changing the way we live, learn and do business at a rate unprecedented in human history. By examining the lessons learned in the past and applying advanced technology to solve for the problems of today, organizations will be able to engineer a better future."

     – Mike Bechtel, chief futurist and managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Deloitte Tech Trends 2022
Now in its 13^th year, Tech Trends applies research, Deloitte's history in working with global organizations across industries and combination of unique business and technology expertise to predict the trends that are most likely to impact businesses in the next 18 to 24 months. This year's trends focus on three main areas: optimizing IT, advancing the enterprise and projecting the possible:

Optimizing IT: By applying automation, AI and machine learning to internal processes, lean IT talent can focus on strategic, value-add projects while enhancing operations.

• IT, disrupt thyself: Automating at scale: Future-forward IT organizations are modernizing the "IT back office," moving away from humans reacting to tickets and assignments to a proactive model of self-service and engineered automation.
• Cyber AI: Real defense: As organizations struggle with security breaches, cyber AI can be a force multiplier, enabling security teams not only to respond faster than cyber attackers can move but also to anticipate these moves and act in advance.
• The tech stack goes physical: The explosion of smart devices and increased automation of physical tasks is extending IT's remit to include network-connected smart factory equipment, industrial robots, drones, sensor-embedded devices and countless other business-critical assets.

Advancing the enterprise: Utilizing powerful technology tools such as data, cloud and security, organizations can create powerful new business models to meet customer demands and gain competitive advantage:

• Data-sharing made easy: New technologies give rise to innovative business models and products by simplifying the mechanics of data-sharing across and between organizations — all while preserving the veil of privacy.
• Cloud goes vertical: Cloud and software vendors now offer vertical-specific solutions that modernize legacy processes and jump start innovation. Deploying them is a process of assembly, thus freeing organizations to focus resources on competitive differentiation.
• Blockchain: Ready for business: Blockchain and other distributed ledger technology platforms are fundamentally changing the nature of doing business across organizational boundaries and helping many companies reimagine how they make and manage tangible and digital assets.

Projecting the possible: Field notes from the future looks at technology and trends that stand to take hold in the next five to 10 years including quantum technologies, exponential intelligence and ambient computing.

To download the full report, visit Deloitte's Tech Trends 2022.

Connect with us on Twitter at @DeloitteOnTech or on LinkedIn.

About Deloitte
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SOURCE Deloitte Consulting LLP