Seven Game Changing Digital Technologies for Enterprise Transformation

The trend towards digital transformation of the enterprise, regardless of industry or sector, will accelerate in 2017 from the already significant levels seen last year. We identify the following seven digital technology trends as game changers for software-driven enterprises. The crumbling of the barriers to entry for machine intelligence – driven by the availability of high-quality open-source software components; cloud platforms from all major providers; and the availability of wildly popular and high-quality introductory courses on MOOC platforms – will drive growing mainstream adoption of machine intelligence as a differentiating and foundational technology layer in the digital transformation stack for identifying and closing new revenue opportunities, customizing user experience, driving operational efficiencies, and predicting failures. Also expect to see acceptance and greater adoption of advanced machine learning techniques for delivering closed-loop actionable insights in domains such as the Industrial Internet of Things and cybersecurity. The fully distributed, transparent, tamper-resistant, and auditable shared ledger technology known as blockchain is particularly powerful in settings where multiple parties need to reconcile without a central intermediary, or need to track provenance of assets across organizational boundaries, or need to establish and enforce contracts between untrusting parties and speed up reconciliation with a secure and verifiable audit trail.