Looking to the Future of Business: Five Trends in the Post-Digital Age

Soon digital technologies will cease to be an advantage, becoming commonplace. How can a business in such conditions continue to be ahead of time and competitors? Accenture highlights five technology trends for the next three years

Now the introduction of digital technologies is a strategic priority for any business. In October-December 2018, Accenture analysts polled almost 6700 top managers of companies in 27 countries around the world: the vast majority of 94% assured that the pace of innovation in their companies has accelerated over the past three years. Another 6% said that these rates remained the same, no one reported a slowdown.

Sooner or later, say the authors of the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 study, every company will face a crisis: if digital technologies initially provided their business with a competitive advantage, what will they do when they are available to everyone? What measures need to be taken to start standing out again?

This is the peculiarity of the so-called post-digital world – not a literal rejection of digital technologies, but the development of their own digital competencies in order to stand out from the general background. In their study, Accenture analysts identified five main, in their opinion, trends in the post-digital era, knowing which, it will be easier for an entrepreneur to adapt their business to the future.

To stand out in the competitive post-digital era, companies will need to embrace a new set of emerging technologies. These technologies will be an important catalyst for change in a world where every industry already has a large arsenal of digital tools.

The key set of new technologies is RIRK. This is an abbreviation that includes four areas: technologies of distributed registries (R), artificial intelligence (I), augmented reality (R) and quantum computing (K). To be on the crest of the next wave of innovation and development, businesses need to master RIRK as a group of new technologies. But even today, individual RIRK technologies are changing the situation in various sectors of the economy:

• artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in process optimization and influences strategic decision making;
• augmented reality, immersive technology, gives people completely new opportunities in terms of sensations and interaction with the outside world;
• distributed ledgers are perhaps best known in the context of cryptocurrencies, but they enhance networking capabilities by eliminating the need for intermediaries;
• the technology of quantum computing, the most experimental of the RIRK set, will open up new approaches to solving the most complex computational problems.

As history has shown, the interpenetration of such sets of technologies over a short period of time can cause major changes, during which the face of entire sectors of the economy is changing. RIRK will have the same effect: the rules of the game will change.

Currently, 89% of enterprises are experimenting with one or more RIRK technologies, seeing them as their future competitive advantage, and are increasing investments in RIRK. Separate RIRK technologies are at different stages of adoption and implementation, but there is already a first group of companies using them to increase their competitiveness. Once the cumulative power of RIRK technologies begins to emerge, companies that adopt them too late may not be able to catch up with those in the lead.

The technologies that consumers choose are integrated into their lives and become part of their identity. Through innovation, companies have been able to use this digital identity to develop a deep understanding of their target audience. In the post-digital age, businesses will have ongoing, personalized relationships with individual consumers based on their unique technological identity. This opportunity comes with a lot of responsibility, but in return gives you the constant understanding of customer needs that is essential for leadership in a post-digital world.

A. Changing relationships to partnerships

Initially, companies used information derived from a person’s digital identity to optimize one-time customer interactions. But as digitalization proliferates, business leaders are also working to improve customer experiences and make them last longer.

In the coming post-digital era, a feedback loop is being created for companies: any action of the client (both in work and in private life) becomes a source of information about his future needs. This helps businesses build a constantly updated customer knowledge base that can be used to find common ground with them. Now the goal of companies is to become a permanent and reliable partner in the lives of customers. By understanding what technologies people choose and how they use them, specific companies, like technologies themselves, can take root in a person’s life and provide what he really needs.

B. Establishing trust

As companies explore the possibilities of personalization, companies will have to face new challenges and challenges, such as sometimes consumers want to increase the level of technology presence in their lives, and sometimes not. The same applies to the level of individualization. There is a line between “useful” and “repulsive”, and, moreover, it varies for each individual. If companies want to develop personalized relationships with consumers, they must feel this delicate and ever-changing balance between personalization and privacy.

C. Rethinking Relationships

Integrating new experiences into the lives of clients requires a constant and deep awareness of their needs. This understanding is built on a solid foundation of trust that companies must maintain in every interaction with the consumer. And those who have already begun to solve this problem today will achieve a new level of continuous understanding of the client, which is necessary for leadership in the post-digital world.

An employee becomes a “human+” if he has new technological capabilities combined with his own skills and experience. Today’s employees can use the latest technologies to rethink their current roles and find new, innovative ways to change and thrive in the post-digital era. The problem is that companies are still recruiting, hiring and managing the workforce of yesteryear. To succeed in this new era, you need to create a culture of continuous learning in the workplace.

“Human+” is rapidly changing positions and organizations, outstripping the speed of traditional recruitment, and the current level of investment in training and retraining of personnel does not solve the problems associated with increased mobility of employees. To keep up with the times, we need to rethink how we hire and train staff, and adopt approaches that better align with the agility of People+. For example, searching for hidden talents of existing employees and ensuring the optimal distribution of current staff to new positions. As workforce mobility increases, knowledge and skills are increasingly distributed as companies adapt technology strategies to ensure knowledge management is in line with the people+ era.

Top managers recognize that in the struggle for qualified personnel, the most important thing is not who a person is at the start, but how far he can go. Turning employees into “people+” has empowered people more than management could have imagined just a few years ago. This is one of the biggest wins of the digital transformation era. Organizations can rely on employees who continually improve their knowledge and skills to drive innovation on a large scale.

In today’s Internet-connected digital ecosystems, cyberattacks can reach unprecedented proportions. As more and more of the physical world falls under digital control, the potentially dangerous consequences of these attacks will continue to grow. An incident that once hurt a single enterprise can now spread and deepen, threatening a company’s partner organizations, an entire industry, or even large parts of an entire economy. Organizations must learn to cooperate in the field of information security and consider such cooperation as the basis for building partnerships.

A modern approach to enterprise security means moving away from the “my company comes first” mindset. The threats emerging today require joint action. The sooner companies start building security partnerships that reflect their participation in a shared ecosystem, the sooner they can start building a more resilient business. In a world built on ecosystems, security is no longer seen as the protection of one organization – it concerns everyone.

In a post-digital world, every moment will be a potential moment for you to open up the market – and a chance to meet the huge expectations of the new era. Direct digital access to customers and powerful analytics enable innovative personalization strategies. A sophisticated set of in-house technology solutions enables businesses to quickly refocus their efforts to meet market demands. Companies will need to combine these opportunities to seize the moment and capture the market.

What does it mean to “seize the moment” in relation to the market? It is the ability to deliver products or services to a specific customer at a specific moment when they are needed. The world has been moving towards this goal since the beginning of the use of digital technologies, and in the post-digital era this is finally becoming possible. New technologies allow consumers to access personalized products and services on demand, and businesses to produce products faster and cheaper that can be customized to meet customer requirements. This combination has resulted in ever-increasing consumer expectations. In the post-digital era, it will not be enough to produce either adaptable products or customized or on-demand products and services. People expect both.

The growth of “instant markets” means that every single period of time is a chance to provide a new product or service at the request of a particular client. And once companies are able to, say, deliver products at the right time, they can adapt their detailed demand forecasting methods to look ever further into the future. The next task is to learn how to anticipate major market trends so that you have enough time to develop new strategies.

Companies that use technology strategy to meet growing customer expectations will be far ahead of the competition in the future. Their products will remain relevant in the face of ever-changing needs of customers, partners or employees. This is what will allow them to stand out in a post-digital era of rising expectations.