6 Crucial Technologies Fueling Digital Acceleration in 2023

Once making a move on digital transformation, businesses faced the challenge of making smart use of technologies on an ongoing basis. Digital acceleration has been called to address this challenge, and this time the choice of technologies becomes even more topical.

According to PwC’s 2022 Digital IQ Survey, 57% of US companies that accelerated digital transformation over the past two years mentioned technology as the key asset for preserving quality performance.

At the same time, 93% of executives and decision-makers claim that making the right choices among disruptive technologies is a primary challenge in approaching digital acceleration.

With technology underlying the success of modern organizations, understanding the value of each innovation and the way it applies to addressing a company’s business needs becomes the top-of-mind priority.

In this post, we’ll uncover six technology trends that have already contributed to digital business acceleration and are likely to bring organizations even more value in the upcoming years.

Intelligent automation as an asset

Intelligent automation brings traditional rule-based automation to the next level by applying a robust combination of tools, technologies, and platforms for increased efficiency, speed-to-insight, and accuracy.

Being an asset for digital transformation acceleration, IA presupposes rolling out a set of technologies and practices aimed at adding more value to the way businesses operate:

• applying robotic process automation (RPA) to routine and manual processes
• introducing business process management (BPM) and advanced analytics to get a holistic view of data and processes from the inside out
• enabling smart use of AI by applying machine learning to get more value from data
• establishing an automation center of excellence (CoE) to accelerate and scale automation at an enterprise level
• deploying event-driven software architecture to improve decision-making and scalability
• providing extended possibilities for third-party integrations to make sure users are getting all of what they need in one place

Leveraging data analytics for improved decision-making and CX

While digital transformation mainly treats technology as an asset for work reorganization, acceleration shifts this focus to making smarter decisions and providing better customer experience (CX).

Collecting and analyzing data provides organizations with actionable insights into user behavior and the processes that make a business’ daily routine. Acting as a base for automation, big data analytics applies to a wide range of areas — from customer service to supply chain management.

Examples of data-driven systems and applications often used at an enterprise scale:

• Virtual assistants represent a reinvented approach to the experience customers get from interacting with software solutions. Often used in customer support, such systems collect data from various customer requests and use deep learning techniques to come up with fully-functional digital assistance (chatbots, conversational AI, etc.).
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software embraces employee and process management of a company’s operational departments. Data collection and analysis play a key role in implementing an ERP and making it work in favor of the company’s efficiency and cost optimization. Speaking of digital transformation acceleration, ERP systems streamline day-to-day business activities, bringing the desired level of transparency and coherence.
• WMS and TMS, which are used for warehouse and transportation management correspondingly, also leverage a data-driven approach. Often integrated with an ERP, such systems collect and analyze data received from shippers and 3PL providers to generate meaningful insights for solving order management, inventory management, accounting, and invoicing tasks.

Getting better reliability and scalability with cloud

It’s been decades since cloud computing emerged as a facilitator of digital transformation. In the Covid times, leveraging cloud services allowed companies to set up collaborative environments for distributed teams and continue working while preserving high productivity.

In 2023, cloud remains a digital acceleration trend, with expenses on public cloud services projected to grow by 20.7% compared to the last year’s numbers.

Speaking about accelerating the ongoing transformation, cloud architecture serves as the basis for innovation. Cloud-based and cloud-enabled architectures are easily scalable. This means technologies like IoT, deep learning, and augmented reality can all be deployed in the cloud.

In terms of digital transformation acceleration, cloud computing brings the below set of benefits:

• enhanced remote collaboration capabilities by providing each team member with a shared space for data storing and easy access to files from multiple devices
• reduced operational costs, as services hosted in the cloud don’t require a company to invest millions in on-prem hardware and software
• increased scalability: cloud-based data storage is elastic by nature and can provide the capacity needed to meet the growing demands of the business (no matter how fast it grows)
• cybersecurity, as data stored in the cloud is encrypted and remains under surveillance of dedicated operations centers; even in case data is corrupted or lost, a provider’s data centers store a backup
• improved return on digital investment (RODI) by increasing the speed of development and overall cost-efficiency

Blockchain-enabled resilience gains traction

Blockchain’s decentralized nature has long ago brought it far away from the notion of a fintech and crypto-specific technology. Blockchain is applicable to solving a number of tasks like freight transportation and supply chain tracking, storing medical records, and empowering crypto-trading.

The key advantages blockchain can bring to companies undergoing digital acceleration are reliable and easy access to information and the ability to handle increasing amounts of data. Since all nodes of the blockchain network share a copy of the ledger, blockchain-based systems are deprived of having a single point of failure and are stable by nature.

Blockchain contributes to digital transformation acceleration in a number of ways:

• improved speed and quality of remote collaboration by enabling joint control of shared information with distributed ledger and automating agreements via smart contracts
• secure transaction storage and data integrity, as the decentralized nature makes blockchains immutable and admits no third-party involvement
• transparent and tamper-proof agreement execution: each block is connected in a cryptographic chain, and a single mechanism is used to validate the transaction and reach an agreement

Ensuring mobility with edge computing

According to Statista’s predictions, the number of consumer edge-enabled devices is likely to hit 6.5 billion by 2030. Edge computing appeared as a way to address the IoT evolution and namely the need to store and process the ever-increasing amounts of data generated by edge devices.

With the world spinning at an increasing velocity, the idea of keeping data close to the resource where it was generated remains topical in 2023. And the main reasons for it being a trend are the low latency and high bandwidth edge computing provides.

Today edge computing is applied to solving a number of complex tasks for businesses operating in different industries, and its use cases include:

• ensuring security and connectivity for IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices
• improving predictive maintenance in manufacturing and operations
• automating time-intensive supply chain management processes
• enabling real-time communications for autonomous and self-driven vehicles
• tracking patients’ health conditions and automating online appointment scheduling
• providing real-time options for surveillance and stock tracking in retail

Rethinking cybersecurity

Calling cybersecurity a trend would probably sound weird and evident, yet the stakes for digital acceleration are that high. With IBM calculating that the average cost of a data breach in the US made $9.44 million in 2022, and Gartner predicting spending on security to reach more than $188.3 billion in 2023, rethinking cybersecurity definitely makes sense.

Each year the cybersecurity sector undergoes transformations to address new threats coming with technology adoption. So what’s on the agenda for 2023?

• cybersecurity mesh architecture adoption continues and is especially in demand for enterprises adopting cloud infrastructures and multi-cloud environments
• strengthening endpoint detection and response (EDR) to secure systems from ransomware attacks
• moving toward a single sign-on approach with multi-factor authentication (MFA) protection
• embracing zero-trust architectures to mitigate the impact of potential cyberattacks and ensure quick recovery from a breach
• investing in cybersecurity training for employees

Wrapping up with the 2023 trends, there remain a few words to be said about approaching digital acceleration per se.

With a variety of trends appearing on the technological horizon, it’s often challenging to find the right balance between the overwhelming potential of innovation and the measurable results it can bring to your business.

For 12 years of making digital partnerships, Trinetix has brought technology to empower dozens of businesses that strived for growth, safety, process optimization, or scaling. Our end-to-end approach has helped proven industry leaders in accounting, logistics, healthcare, and financial services accelerate business transformation and focus on further growth.

Let’s chat about accelerating digital transformation for your business. Innovation makes a difference, why don’t we make it together?