BackNew mantra for Digital Age: People First
This year's Accenture Technology Vision also underscores five emerging technology trends shaping this new landscape, with the 'People First' theme flowing through each of them
Premium
We are undoubtedly in the midst of a major technology revolution with digital now dominating every sector of the economy.
The global digital economy accounted for 22% of the world’s economy in 2015. It is rapidly growing, and forecast to increase to 25% by 2020—up from 15% in 2005, according to the Accenture Technology Vision 2016 released this month.
The report states that we are seeing an important new shift as the technology revolution begins to put people first simply because, as businesses become digital, their people and cultures must become digital, too.
This is also the theme of the Accenture report titled People First: The Primacy of People in a Digital Age, which looks at the competitive advantage that awaits companies that move beyond digital culture shock to create a thriving digital culture. The report also looks at the early adopters who are leading the way. High performers of the future won’t merely consume more technology, but will also enable their people to accomplish more with technology.
According to an Accenture survey of more than 3,100 IT and business executives, 86% of the executives anticipate that the pace of technology change will increase rapidly or at an unprecedented rate in their industry over the next three years.
These executives, according to the report, will create new corporate cultures that use technology to enable people to constantly adapt and learn, create new solutions, drive change, and disrupt the status quo.
The report acknowledges that succeeding in today’s digital world is a challenge that can’t be solved simply by consuming more and more technology, or, as some fear, replacing humans with technology. Instead, it advocates that companies must focus on enabling people—consumers, workers and ecosystem partners—to accomplish more with technology.
This year’s Accenture Technology Vision also underscores five emerging technology trends shaping this new landscape, with the “People First" theme flowing through each of them.
Intelligent automation: It is the launching pad for new growth and innovation. Powered by artificial intelligence, the next wave of solutions will gather unprecedented amounts of data from disparate systems and by weaving systems, data and people together to create solutions that fundamentally change the organization, as well as what it does and how it does it.
For instance, finance companies apply natural language processing to compliance and fraud prevention by monitoring electronic communications at financial institutions to identify relationships and entities across threads; law enforcement uses computer vision on facial recognition systems to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source; healthcare providers use a system to analyse massive amounts of data to extract useful sections, such as doctor names, costs and number of complaints, in a bid to create a clean and easy way to find the root cause of declining clinic performance; and automated planning and scheduling, typically for execution by autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, from warehouse to retail store to household.
Liquid workforce companies are investing in the tools and technologies they need to keep pace with constant change in the digital era. But there is typically a critical factor that is falling behind: the workforce. Firms need more than the right technology; they need to harness that technology to enable the right people to do the right things in an adaptable, change-ready and responsive liquid workforce.
Platform economy: The next wave of disruptive innovation will arise from the technology-enabled, platform-driven ecosystems now taking shape across industries. Having strategically harnessed technology to produce digital businesses, leaders are now creating the adaptable, scalable and interconnected platform economy that underpins success in an ecosystem-based digital economy.
Predictable disruption: Every business now understands the transformational power of digital. What few, though, have grasped is how dramatic and ongoing the changes arising from new platform-based ecosystems will be. It’s not just business models that will be turned on their heads. As these ecosystems produce powerful, predictable disruption, whole industries and economic segments will be utterly redefined and reinvented.
Digital trust: Pervasive new technologies raise potent new digital risk issues. Without trust, businesses cannot share and use the data that underpins their operations. That’s why the most advanced security systems today go well beyond establishing perimeter security and incorporate a powerful commitment to the highest ethical standards for data.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
