What's next for technology?
From the increased use of mobile devices and reliance on reliable workforce enablement solutions to the continued focus on creating personalized customer experiences simultaneously with growing performance demands, today’s business leaders need to understand the latest innovations and best practices but also know where to turn for expert guidance and digital strategy services.
So, what’s next for technology in 2023 and beyond?
Here are some of the key trends the RCG team is watching and how your organization can not only adapt but thrive.
The Trends Shaping Technology in 2023 and Beyond
Some of the most notable that RCG is watching include:
Growing Customer Engagement Expectations
Customer expectations are always evolving, but the last five years have seen an increased push for brands to have the technologies and processes in place to provide responsive, personalized, and integrated brand experiences.
This has grown from just providing personalized product recommendations—which customers now take for granted—to brands having the ability to offer multiple touchpoints throughout their buying experience, including messaging and designs relevant to their preferences.
Increasing Focus on Quality Assurance
Quality assurance has always been a key part of the development process, but organizations are increasingly feeling the pressure to balance speed with comprehensive testing.
Applications today need to not only perform under high loads, deliver on data protection and privacy requirements, and evolve to meet new feature requests, but they also need to have the interoperability to function across a range of platforms and integrate within complex ecosystems. These forces are pushing organizations to consider testing with hyper automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and innovative test management tools to streamline the quality assurance process without sacrificing the need to be thorough.
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Real-Time Insights and Operations
AI and machine learning (ML) are no longer tools that are only within the reach of select organizations or universities. Employees and customers now know firsthand their ability to process high amounts of data, deliver real-time analytics, and identify new business insights to drive value.
However, knowing where to implement and apply AI and ML and how to harness their strengths can still be a hurdle for organizations looking to step into this new digital territory.
Maximizing Cloud and Multi Cloud Delivery
As more services, data, and applications migrate to the cloud, organizations need to realign the related cost, accessibility, and reliability elements to ensure they meet their operational and cost requirements.
These decisions are made more complex with the introduction of a more mobile workforce, additional cloud providers, and new security and privacy requirements.
Integrating Agility Throughout the Enterprise
The impacts of digitization are being felt in every part of an organization’s operations, breaking down silos, streamlining business processes, and increasing engagement with coworkers and customers.
These changes are introducing new change management challenges that organizations need to overcome to not only make agility part of their culture but also to maximize the ability to modify, evolve, and enhance their systems and processes to meet new customer demands, operational requirements, and partner opportunities.
Engaging New Digital Enablement Functionality
The drive to maximize value while lowering costs continues, pushing more organizations to explore new approaches, systems, and processes to replace legacy infrastructure, manual workflows, and disjointed collaboration tools.
As more organizations look toward customer engagement platforms, they also need to balance security, accessibility, and multiplatform requirements.
How to Align Your Organization to Stay Ahead of the Curve
These steps include:
Identifying a Strategy
- Identify stakeholders from across your operations and functions.
- Clarify key business objectives and drivers that are shaping your organization’s operations and direction.
- Align your business processes, technology tools, and infrastructure to meet business needs.
- Identify and prioritize the sources of inefficiencies and allocate resources to meet the need.
Focusing on Change Management and Communication
- Garner representation from all the key affected stakeholder groups.
- Proactively communicate and celebrate accomplishments.
- Foster transparency around the meaning and impacts of change and provide training and support.
- Capture lessons learned and focus on the progress being made.
Making Implementation an Organizational Experience
- Frame transformation and change as a journey that will drive value for customers and support growth.
- Demonstrate the return on investment for transformation programs, including highlighting improvements outside of just financial metrics.
- Reinforce the driving vision behind your efforts with a consistent tone and messaging throughout your organization.
Refining and Adapting
- Continue to assess current processes, technology, data, and resource capabilities for their alignment with your vision and expectations.
- Identify metrics, milestones, or waypoints in your journey as set times to evaluate progress and course correct as needed.
- Be open to other industry best practices and experiences as a way to spark new change.
Securing and Protecting Your Assets
- Monitor how changes to your processes and technology are impacting the security of your enterprise systems and data.
- Weave security requirements and reviews into your initiatives from the start to prevent time- and cost intensive rework.
The Services Your Organization Needs to Take Off in 2023
This understanding has shaped how RCG aligns our digital strategy services and teams and how we help our customers make data-driven, sustainable change.
In turn, we align our services into the following areas:
Digital Strategy
We develop customized, holistic digital strategies and actionable road maps that deliver transformational business outcomes for our customers. RCG has a long track record of helping organizations align their transformational efforts to their strategic objectives while tailoring tomorrow’s innovations to meet today’s needs.
Data and AI
We use innovative approaches and advanced data management methods— including AI, ML, analytics, and robotic process automation—to deliver the efficiencies, precision, and business insights needed to enhance customer and employee digital experiences, streamline workflows, and make data-driven decisions.
Cloud Services
As the cloud becomes a more integral part of business operations, organizations need to think more strategically about how they are structuring, managing, and leveraging their environments. RCG helps organizations to:
- Understand customer and enterprise key business and technology drivers.
- Shape a modern cloud strategy and road map.
- Design and implement a nimble, resilient, and secure enterprise architecture.
- Develop a future state operating model.
- Identify applications to target for cloud migration.
- Execute their implementation plan to achieve real business outcomes.
Digital Products and Experiences
RCG has deep experience helping organizations leverage industry-leading tools and best practices to develop new software products and services that are scalable, offer robust integration, and deliver complete user experiences.
RCG offers the complete lifecycle of design and development for web and mobile applications, including the integration of advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and AI.
Quality Engineering
RCG approaches the practice of quality engineering with several key guiding principles in mind. Among the most important are:
- Make development and testing a value-adding capability instead of a “check-the-box” exercise or a cost and time burden.
- Use innovative test management approaches and tools to find the right balance between quality, speed, and cost.
- Leverage state-of-the-art test automation and testing tools to reduce testing time frames and reduce the administrative burden on test run execution.
These principles allow RCG to be a trusted partner capable of rolling up our sleeves to help clients deliver the products and services that define their brand.
Digital Sustainment
RCG helps our clients get the most from their technology investments by helping them to maintain their systems and adapt their needs to prevent technology dead ends and evolve with their customers’ needs and expectations.
Future-Proof Your Operations with RCG
RCG has the industry experience, deep bench of expertise, tools, and accelerators proven to deliver the digital strategy services that today’s organization needs to be ready for tomorrow’s opportunities.
Want to learn more about what it means to have a trusted partner capable of delivering the full range of services to elevate your operations in your corner?
Schedule your personalized discussion with us!
