Contributed ArticleREGIONAL TRANSFORMATION OUTLOOK 2019
As the advance of technology concepts continues to outpace the ability of enterprises to keep up, organisations now face the possibility that so much change will increasingly seem chaotic. But chaos does not mean there is no order. The key is that CIOs will need to find their way to identifying practical actions that can be seen within the chaos. Continuous change can be made into an asset if an organisation sharpens its vision in order to see the future coming ahead of the change that vision heralds.
Failing that, there must be a focus on a greater effort to see the need to shift the mindset of the organisation. With either of these two methods, practical actions can be found in even the seemingly unrelated predictions of the future.
By 2021, 75% of public blockchains will suffer privacy poisoning, inserted personal data that renders the blockchain noncompliant with privacy laws. Companies that implement blockchain systems without managing privacy issues by design run the risk of storing personal data that cannot be deleted without compromising chain integrity. A public blockchain is a pseudo-anarchic autonomous system such as the Internet. Nobody can sue the Internet, or make it accountable for the data being transmitted.
Similarly, a public blockchain cannot be made accountable for the content it bears. Any business operating processes using a public blockchain must maintain a copy of the entire blockchain as part of its systems of record. A public blockchain poisoned with personal data cannot be replaced, anonymised or structurally deleted from the shared ledger. Therefore, the business will be unable to resolve its needs to keep records with its obligations to comply with privacy laws.
Through 2020, 80% of artificial intelligence projects will remain alchemy, run by wizards whose talents will not scale widely in the organisation. When it comes to artificial intelligence techniques, the needed talent is not only technically demanding, mathematically savvy data scientists to inventive data engineers, and rigorous operation research professionals to shrewd logisticians, are needed.
The large majority of existing artificial intelligence techniques talents are skilled at cooking a few ingredients, but very few are competent enough to master a few recipes — let alone invent new dishes. The premises of a more systematic and effective production will come when organisations stop treating artificial intelligence as an exotic cuisine and start focusing on business value first.”
By 2023, there will be an 80% reduction in missing people in mature markets compared with 2018 due to artificial intelligence face recognition. Over the next few years, facial matching and 3D facial imaging will become important elective aspects of capturing data about vulnerable populations, such as children and the elderly or people who are otherwise impaired. Such measures will reduce the number of missing people without adding large numbers of dramatic discoveries in large public crowds. The most important advances will take place with more robust image capture, image library development, image analysis strategy and public acceptance.
By 2023, US emergency department visits will be reduced by 20 million, due to enrollment of chronically ill patients in artificial intelligence-enhanced virtual care. Clinician shortages, particularly in rural and some urban areas, are driving healthcare providers to look for new approaches to delivering care. In many cases, virtual care has shown it can offer care more conveniently and cost-effectively than conventional face-to-face care.
Successful use of virtual care helps control costs, improves quality of delivery and improves access to care. Without change, the traditionally rigid physical care delivery methods will increasingly render healthcare providers noncompetitive. This transition will not come easily, and will require modification of cultural attitudes and healthcare financial models.
By 2023, 25% of organisations will require employees to sign an affidavit to avoid cyberbullying, but 70% of these initiatives will fail. To prevent actions that have a detrimental impact on the organisation’s reputation, employers want to strengthen employee behavioral guidelines, such as anti-harassment and discrimination norms, when using social media. Signing an affidavit of agreement to refrain from cyberbullying is a logical next step. Alternatively, legacy code of conduct agreements should be updated to incorporate cyberbullying. However, cyberbullying is not stopped by signing an agreement. It is stopped by changing culture.
Through 2022, 75% of organisations with frontline decision-making teams reflecting diversity and an inclusive culture will exceed their financial targets. Business leaders across all functions understand the positive business impact of diversity and inclusion. A key business requirement currently is the need for better decisions made fast at the lowest level possible, ideally at the frontline. To create inclusive teams, organisations need to move beyond obvious diversity cues such as gender and race, to seek out people with diverse work styles and thought patterns.
A final key factor to ensure diversity and inclusion initiatives directly contribute to business results is to manage scale and employee engagement with them. There are numerous technologies that can significantly enhance the scale and effectiveness of interventions to diagnose the current state of inclusion, develop leaders who foster inclusion and embed inclusion into daily business execution.
By 2023, ePrivacy regulations will increase online costs by minimising the use of cookies thus crippling the current Internet ad revenue machine. GDPR and upcoming legislation, including The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and ePrivacy continue to limit the use of cookies and put greater pressure on what constitutes informed consent. An individual may not be able to simply accept the use of cookies, as they do now, but, will have to give explicit consent to what the cookie track and how that tracking will be used.
The legislation does cripple the current Internet advertising infrastructure and the players within. The current ad revenue machine is an intricate overlapping of companies that are able to track individuals, compile personal data, analyse, predict and target advertisements. By interrupting the data flow, as well as causing some use to be illegal, the delicate balance of service and provision, that has been built-up over decades of free use of data, is at the very least, upset.
Through 2021, social media scandals and security breaches will have effectively zero lasting consumer impact. The core point of this prediction is that the benefits of using digital technologies outweigh potential, but unknown, future risks. Consumer adoption of digital technologies will continue to grow, and backlash of organisations taking technology too far will be short term.
For the last five years, multiple issues have arisen every year, but the ramifications have been minimal. A main reason is the lack of choice and competition. The network effect, which makes it hard to switch to a different service because everybody is using the service, has proven to be very powerful. Even with a negative sentiment there has been no change so far. Why would the next years be different?
Key takeaways
- The network effect, which makes it hard to switch to a different service because everybody is using the service, has proven to be very powerful.
- Continuous change can be made into an asset if an organisation sharpens its vision in order to see the future coming ahead of the change that vision heralds.
- CIOs will need to find their way to identifying actions that can be seen within the chaos.
- Chaos does not mean there is no order.
