Top 5 digital transformation trends of 2021

Top 5 digital transformation trends of 2021

Low-code, MLOps, data streaming, and multi-cloud management will boost business agility and accelerate organizations' digital transformation journeys in 2021. As weather a fatal pandemic, the year 2020 will be remembered when businesses responded to new threats, switched to new business models, and accelerated their digital transformation initiatives.

Going digital was no longer a corporate luxury in the COVID-19 period of 2020, but a matter of existence. Remote working, moving to collaboration workflows and realigning operations from supply chain management to customer experiences all required digital transformation.
CIOs and IT executives no longer need to persuade the business of the importance of technology in all parts of operations. The challenge in 2020 was how quickly IT could collaborate with business executives to offer cloud collaboration, workflow, and analytics capabilities.

This trend will continue through 2021, but with a twist: IT executives will change from a reactive to a proactive, strategic approach to digital transformation. IT executives will collaborate with their business counterparts to develop and enhance digital business models, promote a culture that values innovation, and leverage technology and data to gain a competitive advantage. Here are the five themes that will influence how CIOs and IT leaders develop goals, objectives, and digital transformation roadmaps that will help their organizations thrive.

Agile goes deeper into the enterprise to reshape business models, culture.

IT leaders have used agile methods to create apps, enhance machine learning models, automate CI/CD pipelines, and deliver other important initiatives that involve collaboration with business stakeholders, IT executives have adopted agile techniques. The product owner’s position has become increasingly important in managing business/IT partnerships. Meanwhile, as DevOps culture and techniques were adopted, IT firms had to reimagine how they functioned.

However, adopting agile techniques and DevOps was only the first step in an enterprise’s quest to create agile business models and cultures capable of supporting digital transformation. More CIOs identified opportunities to collaborate with business executives on the agility needed to improve company processes in 2020. Expect to see CIOs driving agile further into their businesses in 2021:

• Business colleagues from marketing, operations, finance, HR, and sales will form multidisciplinary agile teams that will sprint and release business capabilities.
• Change management applications will migrate advanced and become change programs by involving clients, pioneering adopters, and stakeholders in the developing process.

Low-code use cases focus on customer and employee experiences.

In response to COVID-19 and remote working, low-code platforms become critical in 2020 for businesses wanting to quickly create workflow apps, integrations, and automation. These apps provided personalized support to employees on safety, health, and family requirements and supported them established their remote office settings.

Automations helped companies save expenses by filling process gaps. Low-code platforms have existed for decades, but they are becoming increasingly important to CIOs and business executives trying to modernize their organizations. In 2021, digital leaders will utilize a combination of low-code, remote automation systems, and integration techniques to enhance customer and employee services across a wider range of business sectors and at a larger scale.

Cloud computing service providers enable multi-cloud architectures.

For many businesses, cloud migration entailed a hybrid cloud architecture in which IT operations supported programs running in data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. While most businesses are still developing their architectures and services on a single public cloud, many have realized that they need to be able to operate across several public clouds. Reasons include the following:

• Avoiding vendor lock-in;
• Facilitating cost and service-level negotiation;
• Enabling innovation on emerging services;
• Complying with data sovereignty regulations; and
• Supporting acquisitions.

Supporting multi-cloud architectures is difficult today, but public cloud suppliers understand that multi-cloud integration, administration, and support are important to their commercial partnerships with major organizations. There are services, such as Azure Arc and Google Anthos that support IT management system resources and Kubernetes batches across various clouds. Some of the problems of digital transformation will be addressed by vendor support for multi-clouds. Enterprises wanting to migrate and expand strategic workloads on the correct clouds for the task will benefit from the rising number of deployment options and multi-cloud management solutions available.

Real-time data processing and event-driven architectures go mainstream.

Real-time data processing used to be a tough technological goal reserved for areas like finance and advertising technology, where firms with split-second data latency reductions gain substantial commercial benefits. Many businesses had to deal with inconsistent data updates that were scheduled to run nightly, weekly, or monthly, as well as human operations to repair stoppages, data quality concerns, and perform complicated queries.
To enable real-time data processing, CIOs today have a variety of architecture alternatives. Cloud infrastructures that scale on request, open-source data platforms such as Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, real-time data streaming platforms, platforms that enable event-driven architectures, and RPA software that can automate many parts of data gathering are a few examples.

Simplified MLOps brings machine learning from POC to production

Machine learning models are being used in production by large technology, social media, and technically savvy firms, while other industries are trailing behind. Only 45 percent of respondents in Algorithmia’s “2020 status of enterprise machine learning” survey had deployed models into production.

Even businesses that were successful in deploying machine learning (ML) models struggled, with over 40% needing more than thirty days to do so. Over 28% of artificial intelligence/machine learning projects fail, according to an IDC report released in June. However, don’t interpret the company’s present problems as a sign that machine learning is on its way out. Machine Learning will gain traction as more IT and data science companies have a better understanding of MLOps (data scientists, IT pros collaborating to automate ML algorithms) and as more platforms offer ML lifecycle management features.

Businesses prioritize practical solutions that deliver near-term value.

In keeping with the term’s broad scope, digital transformation trends are diverse. This list of trends for 2021 is unique. It focuses on technologies and strategies that can assist more businesses in achieving near-term digital transformation advantages by leveraging competitive data and technological capabilities.
In other terms, MLOps, low-code, multi-cloud management, and data streaming service will be critical for organizations across various sectors to transition from agile driving efficiency to business agility capabilities.