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The IT and business services industry is set for a shake-up after a tumultuous year, with research firm IDC flagging five key trends to keep a note of from now until 2025.
The new year is synonymous with embracing change, and this couldn’t be truer after moving past the mass disruption that came during 2020.
“Senior line-of-business and IT leaders are learning how buyer requirements are shifting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and placing greater pressure on services firms and providers to meet critical needs in areas,” research manager Laura Becker said.
The trends, according to IDC, have the potential to shape the five-year business plans of organisations around the world.
2021 — Employees
In the short term, the research firm claimed employee experience (EX) programs are expected to pick up steam — as long as they’ve been fleshed out.
“By the end of 2021, 70 per cent of organisations with mature EX programs will have returned to pre-2020 growth trajectories, compared with only 20 per cent of organizations with immature EX programs,” Becker claimed.
Also by the end of the year, nearly a third of organisations are predicted to be utilising “employee-based personas” in order to enhance that employee experience.
2022 — Transformation put through its paces
A year later in 2022, most vendors’ innovation centres — at 90 per cent — are expected to be repurposed into innovation networks that combine both virtual and physical aspects, as opposed to locations dedicated purely to face-to-face working environments.
Additionally, 2022 is also predicted to see just over half of large global organisations with over 1,000 employees accelerate their digital transformation projects. For a point of comparison, the research firm claims 36 per cent have already begun the acceleration process.
As a result, the other half of those organisations will end up being “increasingly disadvantaged”.
2023 — Multiclouds and resilience
Moving forward to 2023, Becker said over 70 per cent of organisations will pick up multicloud management platforms within managed cloud services in order to standardise toolsets, ensure quality of service and enable demand management.
That year is expected to also see over two-thirds of the Forbes Global 2000 (G2000) organisations take up service delivery resilience assessment and assurance in over 75 per cent of their externally sourced business and IT services.
2024 — Not PaaSing over speedy automation
Three years from now, 75 per cent of organisations will use automation over multiple processes in order to optimise existing processes further and free up operational cash, Becker said.
The research firm also claimed that 2024 will see over half of organisations — at 55 per cent — use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as a primary application development platform for custom applications, as well as reinforcing DevOps maturity through application portfolios.
There is also anticipated to be quite a large minority of global organisations, at over 45 per cent, prioritising faster turnaround and speed to value, when selecting services vendors.
2025 — Diving into deep portfolios
At the far end of IDC’s prediction, the research firm claimed that 2025 will see 75 per cent of organisations set on growing revenue will choose vendors with portfolios that contain strategy, design and technology services.
