“Disruption” is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Every person with a slightly innovative idea is talking about disrupting the established way of doing things. Some people succeed in creating disruption. The founders of Facebook, for example, managed to disrupt both social dynamics and how people get their news. Other people fail, and we soon forget about their ideas.
The role of a disruptor isn’t new. There have been disruptors walking the planet for as long as we’ve been able to use tools. And disruption has been slowly getting us to the world we live in now. The wheel was a disruption, and so were steam engines, coal engines, electricity, the first automobile. Disruption is powering change, and there are no bigger engines of change today than digital technologies. As we’re nearing the end of the second decade of the 21st century, these are the technologies that are having the most impact on the world of business.
Table of Contents
Cloud Computing
Everyone who owns a smartphone and has an account with a digital services provider is aware of the cloud. The cloud is a place that stores photos, music, and other types of files. And while the storage capabilities of clouds are noteworthy, they are not the main reason there’s a fully fledged cloud craze going on.It’s not the best way to take advantage of cloud computing, either.
Cloud computing has been used to power three very important business models that are affecting the world of business — software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In these models, software, platforms, and infrastructure are offered by service providers, with no need for users to host anything on their hardware. The effect of these models is that, for example, a real estate company can use the best real estate CRM on the market without a large upfront investment. More importantly, the company would need only an Internet connection to access the CRM. And finally, it would be able to scale up or down the services as much as it needs.
Remote Working
Remote working isn’t a tech trend as much as it’s a business trend. But it’s a trend largely enabled through tech developments that gave us instant messaging, video calling, and cloud computing.
In the United States, roughly 3% of workforce telecommutes, or works away from a place that is not the company’s place of work. Remote working comes with a lot of benefits for both the employees and the businesses. The bottom line is, however, that remote working is a trend that can cut costs for employees and businesses alike. For workers, it can improve access to opportunity by allowing them to work at better-paid jobs for employers from other countries. For businesses, it can open the door to an incredible pool of talent that doesn’t take geographical or national boundaries into account.
Big Data
Most of us have gotten used to the fact that the majority places we go online, and most things we do, are being tracked. How we get to a website, what we do while we’re there, and how much time we spend doing it is only some of the information about our online activities that can be easily gathered. With the world getting near to its four-billionth Internet user, the amount of data that’s gathered is staggering.
Big Data is the term used for such large quantities of data. Gathering, storing, and analyzing so much data comes with a lot of challenges. That’s why it’s the big businesses that can really use Big Data right now. However, with data as a service becoming more accessible, small and medium businesses will soon enough be able to enjoy its benefits. Why would they want to do it? Analysis of so much data can provide valuable insights that can help businesses develop better products, and market and sell them more efficiently.
Artificial Intelligence
Thinking machines have been predicted in science fiction novels many years before we started developing artificial intelligence. But here we are, at a point in time when AI is about to become indispensable for businesses.
The AI we have today is far away from Arthur Clarke’s HAL 9000, but it can still do impressive things. From personal assistants to self-driving cars, from customer service to personal finance, AI is being used to perform activities that were, until recently, assigned to humans. Automation is probably the major of the ways artificial intelligence is changing the world of business.
The world was a very different place only twenty years ago. Every indicator points towards it being even more different twenty years from now. As disruption spreads and becomes more commonplace, who knows what new technologies will come up and what kinds of changes they will bring. For now, however, businesses who want to grow and be competitive need to keep an eye on these four technology trends.
About Carson Derrow
