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Tech Trends in Creating Future Possibilities
Tech Trends in Creating Future Possibilities

February 11, 2022

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Introduction:

The pace of enterprise transformations has accelerated—what was taking decades to change is now happening in just 3-5 years. The events like COVID has given wheels to this change ecosystem. Today, no one talks about if and why there needs to be a change, instead, the conversation has shifted towards: Are we agile enough to quickly change or pivot?

Clearly, technology is no more a choice, it is a foundation of every enterprise. The officers table in the enterprises have equal representation of business functions as well as IT.

In this article, we will go over few of the key characteristics and behaviors that high performing and agile enterprises should demonstrate which will set them up for continued success. While the examples here are from the retail domain, these are pretty much applicable to every business domain powered by technology. Let’s go over these:

  • Customer obsession: Customer-centric product development is here to stay. We see that organizations are increasingly giving importance to two types of customers, and this trend would intensify. The first one is the end customer that generates the revenue for the enterprise. The second one is the product and the engineering community that develops the solutions for those customers. The productivity of the latter will be a critical focus area for enterprises as they invest in custom building and adopting open-source platforms and products. Speed and agility to experiment, learn, and change will be key for these tools.  
  • Platform mindset and strong foundations: Today every organization needs to have a holistic view of the platforms and products in an enterprise architecture blueprint. To that end, platforms are going to be crucial to the success of a company and will feature across the entire tech value chain; for instance, Observability platforms, platforms for moving data between data centers, platforms to abstract deployment concerns across multiple cloud providers, checkout registers and device management, IoT hubs, payments, route optimizer, task management, content streaming, marketing content management, digital displays, and list goes on. Leaders would value the platforms even higher than the customer-facing products because platforms would power the ability to experiment, pivot and scale as needed. A platform can abstract the underlying complexities and provide seamless APIs; on the other hand, it gives the core platform teams avenues to innovate and create possibilities for the future.
  • Operational excellence: For selling products online, the eCommerce websites need to be highly scalable, available, with the right KPI measurement capabilities. Likewise, for Stores and Supply Chain kinds of businesses—where the physical sites are distributed—it is imperative to have mechanisms to bubble up all the events generated at the site to a central data center (cloud). To that end, event streaming patterns will be core to the product that provides the technical and business health of the systems and provides avenues to improve the productivity of associates—employees— working in the Stores and the Distribution centers.
  • Innovation: To inspire iterative and transformational innovation capabilities, enterprises of the future will create mini and full-fledged labs at multiple locations that would fully mimic a real business environment. These could be a combination of physical labs or virtualized lab environments with full fledged network rules. Any disruptions in these labs would be treated as production incidents and addressed on priority. When done right, these labs can offer technical and business teams the opportunities to work collaboratively on real production pilots, which has vast potential to
    • increase the chances of delivering something meaningful for the customers and the company,
    • And help change course and sometimes close out the idea after testing the early feasibility in the labs.

The value of the fully functional labs with virtualized capabilities is immense, and the enterprises should invest big in them. For enterprises looking to partner with other startups or product vendors to carry out POCs and innovate, these labs would play a critical foundational element in quick test-and-learn strategies. 

  • Smart Edges: With cheaper commodity hardware, IoT devices, memory, CPU, and GPUs vastly available, the edge systems will no more be dumb. Smart registers, smart shelves, smart devices will become commonplace moving forward. These innovative and intelligent systems will bank on event-driven, reactive, and microservices architecture. Moreover, these systems would be physically distributed although maintained centrally using the events and telemetry pipelines, providing the best operational efficiencies. Organizations must invest in smart edge systems to gain the right competitive advantages.
  •  Democratized product intelligence: Typically, it is left to a retailer to incorporate theft prevention systems like video analytics, alarms, smart tags, etc., for high value products. However, this trend will move towards more democratized models. From manufacturing to selling at the stores or online, we would see technology evolution wherein the products will not be unusable unless deliberately activated at the point of sale. This would make the product useless if shoplifted without making a checkout transaction at the point of sale. Product and manufacturing companies would gear up to device newer protocols, smart chips, etc., which would revolutionize electronic and mechanical product segments. 

Conclusion:

As organizations prepare themselves for the next stage of their evolution, agile and product practices will be key to their success. Agile and product practices allow the change cycles to be built to the product development and, in essence, enforce value-driven development and delivery. The engineering community will see more substantial adoption of open source projects, mainly of well-backed open source communities like CNCF.

The product managers who excel in the art of defining and measuring the value of a feature or a product would find tons of opportunities to grow. Likewise, the engineers who are quick to learn newer technologies and who are rooted in leveraging engineering tools and platforms would remain hot in the market.

 This is perhaps a great time to be in the field of technology, embracing it for creating newer possibilities for the future.

This blog is authored by Mr. Rajiv Raghunathan, Senior Director - IT, Lowe's India. 


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