As the effects of the pandemic spur digital transformation across all industries, we will continue to see businesses drive toward more integration, automation, and innovation. Specifically, companies that will be leaders in their spaces will embrace new tools and restructure how they leverage technology to stay competitive.
In a world where the employee experience is now as paramount as the customer experience, the evolving digital workspace will remain in the spotlight. Below are my four predictions for what we’ll see in 2022 from the business and technology worlds.
iPaaS will become more than integration in the cloud
The companies that win the future will be those that solve end-to-end business problems for their customers with a well-integrated suite of products. This includes providing iPaaS capabilities, but also exposing APIs so they can build mobile, web, and conversational applications that allow them to automate tasks using their already-existing apps. Along these lines, building integrations with low-code solutions will eventually be replaced by having a conversation with a chatbot, essentially detailing the business need in order to build the appropriate application.
The citizen developer will continue to rise
In today’s business environment, the bulk of application development is handled by technical staff, heavily dependent on those who understand and can write code. This takes control away from those on the business side of the house, ultimately diminishing ROI. One trend I’m watching is the rise of citizen developers—business-minded professionals with the ability to build apps themselves rather than being fully dependent on the true tech folks who write code. While low-code and no-code tools have been in the conversation for some time when it comes to this issue, adoption of these tools will increase dramatically along with the aforementioned digital workspaces and workforces.
Digital workspaces and workforces will take a leap forward
Most of us became accustomed to Zoom and other communication/collaboration tools as work went remote. While helpful, these tools still don’t accurately recreate or mirror what it’s like to collaborate in person. Today, if you have a technological design problem, for example, it’s much more difficult to problem-solve online than it is in person. In the coming year and beyond, vendors will develop tools that are more productive and efficient than what’s currently on the market. While the end result may not be exactly the same as working in a shared physical space, we will take a significant step forward in creating a virtual office experience that’s much closer to the real thing.
Hyperautomation will (finally) start to become the norm
When it comes to automation, the natural tendency for humans is to avoid it out of fear that it will replace their jobs. This has turned out not to be the case, however; automation instead enables human workers to learn and develop new skills that are more valuable to their organizations and their own careers. In reality, automation technology still isn’t available to the masses. Rather, automation is mainly adopted and implemented at the top end of enterprises via technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA). Once these technologies trickle down to SMBs, that’s when we will see the proliferation of hyperautomation—the idea that anything that can be automated should be automated. In the end, the intent is not to replace jobs, but to allow business people to shift focus away from tedious tasks and focus on more rewarding work.
Ultimately, the marker of the competitive business of the future will be the courage to embrace emerging solutions instead of sticking to the ways of the past—or even the ways of today. By introducing new integration capabilities, workspaces, experts, and automation, those companies will grab 2022 by the horns.
Manoj Chaudhary is CTO at Jitterbit.
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