The age of Hyper-Innovation Work 2022 – more innovation, more opportunities
20.01.2022A guest commentary by Oliver Ebel *
The pandemic fueled the digital transformation. This year, too, the way we work will continue to evolve and change. This post looks at the trends that companies should be preparing for now.
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Digitization will also be accelerated in 2022 thanks to various trends, some trends can be found in this article.
(Picture: Nattapong – stock.adobe.com)
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, work and business models have changed fundamentally in the past two years and have led to a real innovation boost. When the pandemic broke out, companies reacted quickly by implementing new technologies to improve internal operations and interact with customers.
According to the Citrix study The Era of Hyper-Innovation, investments in new tools and flexible working methods increased revenue by $678 billion across industries last year. In the coming year, the focus will therefore be even more on innovation and growth – 69 percent of executives worldwide want to further increase their investments in research and development over the next 12 months. However, companies should consider the following developments in their future planning:
Workers demand more freedoms
The number of people quitting their jobs is at a record high. This further exacerbates the shortage of skilled workers – especially for sought-after skills such as cloud, security, AI and analytics, which are needed for the digitization of the economy. Companies must therefore rethink their offer to their employees and become more involved in their wishes: flexible working models that enable everyone to make a contribution to the company’s success, advance their careers and work on their own terms. Companies will be less and less able to dictate to their employees where and how they have to work.
In the effort of companies to attract qualified workers and gain an advantage in the “War for Talents”, a new job category will emerge. This will be characterized by the flexibility and autonomy that many freelancers, contract workers and so-called gig workers crave, and at the same time offer them a certain degree of stability, which has become increasingly important for employees in the wake of the pandemic.
Digital innovation creates virtual workspaces
In the coming year, companies will also redefine the role of their physical office and set up convenient digital workstations that allow employees to access internal resources safely and reliably. This will allow you to perform your work efficiently and effectively, working with colleagues, partners and customers through any device, working channel and location. And they will support you with policies that promote equitable working practices to ensure that no employee is disadvantaged because of where they are.
Working together in a post-pandemic world where the office no longer has four walls and companies are trying to improve their CO2 footprint by reducing global travel could also boost the demand for meetings in virtual reality: digitally interwoven, photorealistic worlds that convey almost the same feeling of presence and cooperation as the physical world. There are many companies with technologies that can create such worlds: Facebook, for example, recently announced that it would bet its entire future on the metaverse.
More innovation through more intelligence and better connectivity
In addition, the innovation opportunities offered by AI will continue to increase massively. An example is OpenAI Codex – an AI that translates natural language into code. The system already knows more than a dozen programming languages and is able to interpret simple commands in natural language and execute them on behalf of the user.
This enables the creation of a natural language interface to existing applications and opens up a wide range of possibilities for business units or end users. It requires nothing more than the voice of the respective user to create new experiences and interact with complex back-end systems.
In addition, the introduction of 5G, WiFi6 (802.11ax) and LoRa/LPWAN networks will enable a significant change in connectivity, which will be the basis for edge computing and create new opportunities. As the demand for global bandwidth continues to grow, hyperscalers will continue to expand both undersea and terrestrial capacity, encouraging companies to route their network traffic through hyperscaler backbones. This will provide an opportunity to create parallel networks that provide better performance, range and security than the traditional Internet.
Hyper-automation and decentralization
Robotic process automation (RPA) is increasingly being used to manage less complex, departmental processes. When companies want to take a broader, cross-company perspective on automation in order to free up human resources for higher-value tasks, hyperautomation comes into play.
This is a combination of various technologies such as RPA, AI, Process Discovery &Mining, business process management and low-code workflow. Hyperautomation is about completely redesigning processes by rethinking the optimal number of steps and using technologies that automate these steps throughout the enterprise.
With increasing concerns about privacy, ownership, trust and access rights, there is a growing interest in decentralized apps (dApps) and the possibilities they offer for both companies and commercial developers. dApps are digital applications that run on a distributed ledger and are beyond the control of a single instance.
This allows key information such as user identity or profile data to remain in the possession of the actual end user and is not stored by a service provider. A large part of the current focus of dApps is in the area of DeFi (decentralized finance). Although they are relatively new, they are gaining in importance and are likely to set the standard for future industries.
Conclusion
The global economy and the world of work have changed significantly as a result of the pandemic and offer an optimal scenario for forward-looking companies that want to redouble their efforts. Those who have transformed their work and business models over the past two years now have the opportunity to use even more technologies to meet new challenges. At the same time, these companies can create the conditions to attract the flexible and innovative workforce they need to lead their company into the future.
* Oliver Ebel, Area Vice President Central Europe at Citrix, explains
