5 Reasons 2017 Will Be A Transformative Year For Tech

If you thought 2016 was a banner year for changes in IT, look ahead: 2017 is shaping up to be even bigger, according to industry analysts. Although there aren’t many new concepts on the immediate horizon, trends that began a year ago now possess momentum few organizations will be able to resist. Here are the top five forces that will shape IT in 2017.

It’s All About The Customer

According to Forrester Research, focus on customer experience will dominate enterprise strategies, and this will have an effect on all aspects of organizations including IT. “In 2017, expect firm-wide operational changes to focus on customer experience—and an increasing number of wholesale business model changes to focus on specific customer journeys.”

A customer journey is every step a person takes with a company, from first hearing about it to buying, getting help and coming back. Thinking in journeys forces departments that used to work separately, such as marketing, sales, support and IT, to look at the same experience from the customer’s side.

For IT teams, that shift means their work is judged less by whether systems are running and more by whether the customer’s experience is smooth. A slow checkout page or a support system that can’t see a customer’s order history becomes an IT problem as much as a service problem.

Heavy Clouds

Small scale experiments with cloud platforms will give way to major transformations. “The cloud will be distributed with 60% of IT done off-premise and 85% by multi-cloud by 2018 and 43% of IoT will be processed at the edge in 2019,” according to Forbes’ summary of IDC’s tech predictions.

Two terms in that prediction are worth unpacking. Multi-cloud means using more than one cloud provider at once, for example running some systems on one public cloud and others on another, often to avoid depending on a single vendor or to use each provider’s strengths.

Edge computing means processing data close to where it’s created, on a device, in a factory or at a nearby facility, rather than sending everything to a distant data center. For connected sensors that need to react quickly, or that produce more data than is worth sending, handling it at the edge saves time and bandwidth.

IoT

Enthusiasm for the Internet of Things will continue to grow as companies seek to increase efficiencies through better algorithmic analysis of the data that connected sensors generate. But Forrester warns there could be unexpected costs and complexity, thanks to a growing number of vendors, an increase in the kind of wireless protocols used, and a shortage of skilled networking professionals to manage it.

That warning was a useful counterweight to the hype. Connecting a sensor is the easy part. Making devices from different vendors talk to each other, keeping them secure and updated, and turning their data into decisions takes people and planning that many early projects underestimated.

Changing Realities

AR and VR are two more areas of experimentation that are expected to become more deeply embedded as companies find new ways to interact with consumers, as well as internally. “In 2017, 30% of consumer-facing G2000 companies will experiment with AR/VR as part of their marketing efforts,” says IDC. One in five global brands will use AR for shopping by the end of 2017, predicts Gartner.

Some of the most important AR news of 2017 came from Apple. In June, it previewed iOS 11 and ARKit, a platform for developers to build apps that place virtual content on top of real-world scenes. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, said Apple was “delivering the biggest AR platform in the world,” available to developers building for hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users. Apple’s announcement named immersive shopping as one of the uses, the same kind of retail experiment Gartner had in mind.

AI

Deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing will all continue to play growing roles in the enterprise: IDC states that by 2019, 40% of digital transformation initiatives —and 100% of IoT initiatives—will be supported by AI capabilities.

What Actually Happened

Looking back, AI is the prediction that grew far beyond what analysts imagined in 2016. Natural language processing, one of the technologies on IDC’s list, became the center of the industry after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. In January 2023, Microsoft announced a “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, its third, following earlier investments in 2019 and 2021, and said it would deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products.

AR and VR took a slower path. Phones made AR widely available, but dedicated headsets stayed a niche. Apple’s own headset, Vision Pro, only went on sale in the U.S. on February 2, 2024, more than six years after ARKit.

The cloud and IoT forecasts describe how IT now works more than they describe a single event. Using several cloud providers, running some workloads at the edge and connecting sensors to analytics are all ordinary parts of enterprise IT today, along with the costs and complexity Forrester warned about.

The common thread is the one the article opened with: few of these ideas were brand new in 2017. What changed was how widely and how seriously they were adopted. For anyone planning technology now, that’s still the useful question to ask about a trend, not whether it exists, but whether it’s ready to be used at scale.