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Tech Disruption in 2018
Forbes recently posted an interesting article on nine disruptive tech breakthroughs in 2018. I found it to be a good read and saw some real parallels within the search industry. I’ve shared my thoughts on these points below. The full article can be found here, and I’ve included excerpts from each of their disruptors.
Sean: It’s good to see the ground swell around low-code and no-code applications and integrations. From a search perspective, this opens up the opportunity to increase findability into many more systems and lower the overall cost of ownership of search solutions. For IT, these types of approaches are force multipliers, allowing already stretched teams to gain productivity and deliver more value.
Sean: Had this been my article, I’d have dropped the “Consumer” qualifier from that statement. We see privacy consumers across the board. From internal analytics tracking of employee activity, to cloud data protection for 3rd party data, privacy and the associated data protection that comes along with it are major topics. The continued maturity of cloud platforms and security validations show that the industry is responding and taking privacy as seriously as it should be.
Sean: From a business perspective, there is still a lot of skepticism about where voice fits into the enterprise. Will an employee that works within an open work environment feel comfortable talking to their computer? From what we have heard, that answer is going to be no for a while. Voice fits the mobile use case quite well, but the underlying theme here is natural language. Be it voice, free text input, chat bot, etc. the real key is to drive applications to communicate with users in natural language first, then you can follow on with voice later.
Sean: Blockchain is all the talk, and Blockchain developers are certainly in high demand and being paid a premium. My word of caution is to avoid the hype, understand it deeply, and make sure there is a real problem it can solve. As with any emerging technology, there will be a push to incorporate it simply based on its ground swell. Someone will get burned because of that, so think smart here.
Sean: We see this every day. Healthcare and related fields generate massive amounts of information, and accessing this information is caught in legacy approaches and applications. Companies that innovate around access to information will gain an advantage over their competitors. I see an innovation race happening here, and I think we’ll all benefit from it.
Sean: I’ll offer a little buzz word alert here. AI and ML are game changers, but there also isn’t a common agreement as to what is or is not AI. Organizations will need to cut through marketing hype and dig into the actual technology to separate fact from fiction. My advice here is to integrate fast and integrate often. Whole platforms that embed “AI” into a black box are risky, solutions that allow integrations with AI capabilities to solve specific needs provide the best long term play.
Sean: Yes please. Access speeds and latency need to continue to improve so that these next generation AI- enabled applications can respond as quickly as possible. Speed increases adoption because no one likes to wait.
Sean: The jury is still out on this one for me. There are some specific use cases in corporations for these types of solutions, but we’re still a few years out until I would put this on a CIOs radar.
Sean: This makes me instantly think of the Star Trek universal translator, and it’s very cool to see this come to reality. To me, this builds on the same comments earlier around speech recognition and language processing. Still a little way out for enterprise IT applications, but indicates a bright future in spoken interaction to traditional systems, regardless of what language you speak.
Thanks to Forbes for putting that list together as it’s always good to take a step back and recognize where technology impact is coming from. It will be interesting to do this review again in 2019 and see what has changed.