As a new year arrives, we see more transformation on the horizon. Technology is tumbling faster toward the cloud, AI, and the metaverse, while our businesses deal with a recession and a dramatic shift in work habits and expectations from both employees and employers.
Below, we dive deeper into the upcoming challenges we’ll face in 2023 and how we can best align ourselves and our businesses to solve these issues head-on.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is on-demand computer resources like databases, storage, and computational power available through the internet that do not require direct management of hardware by businesses. Some examples include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google, which offer distributed cloud computing with “pay as you go” or subscription models.
Why Is Cloud Computing a Challenge?
Around 75% of technical professionals from industries around the world confirmed that their organizations were already running apps using cloud services like AWS. In 2023, the cloud service usage market is expected to grow by 21.3% and is estimated to break 495 billion U.S. dollars by the end of 2022.
Cloud computing reduces IT costs and accelerates growth, and nowadays, in order to keep up with new technologies at the rate of competitors, moving to the cloud is almost inevitable.
However, the move is not an easy one-step process. In order to transition fast and safely, it requires resources and planning that many companies may not be equipped for.
How Can We Address This Challenge?
Here are the best ways to tackle cloud adoption:
- Discover the cloud (survey business needs, survey and prioritize platforms and applications, identify pain points).
- Create a cloud strategy plan and roadmap.
- Migrate to the cloud.
- Secure your cloud infrastructure.
- Set up CloudOps, DevOps, and automation for maintenance.
Your journey to the cloud will depend highly on your specific needs, and these general steps can be accomplished within your organization or by consulting with professionals who have done it before to get faster results.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is the practice of changing a company’s non-digital processes into a more technology-first-oriented structure. This can involve a brick-and-mortar clothing company becoming an online retailer instead or a company changing its culture to plan initiatives on a technology-first mentality. The benefits of digital transformations involve increased value and profit from innovation and fulfilling customers’ needs for better, faster, more reliable service.
Why Is Digital Transformation a Challenge?
Executives should audit the parts of their business that could benefit from digital transformation. Legacy applications can harm the brand image and increase maintenance and operational costs that could be solved with digital transformation.
But digital transformation does have challenges. Any type of transition increases the risks of losing service continuity for customers, introduces new security risks, and other natural pitfalls of adapting new technologies.
How Can We Address This Challenge?
To ensure a smooth transformation, you must always audit your current status. Do you have legacy applications that are no longer in use? Do you have a process that creates bottlenecks in your employee’s workflows? Asking the right questions is the first step in understanding and planning a clear roadmap that can be shared with teams.
Only when you understand what you need to change, update, or modernize can you move on to designing, architecting, and prioritizing tasks for teams. Those teams will be in charge of constructing the applications with different phases of testing and deployment.
This process helped the largest multimedia company in Buenos Aires update its business to support new advertising space and programming schedules by enlisting Baufest to develop a new version of its business layer, along with a new front-end Java application to make this happen. This ultimately led to better operational response times, improved daily entry to their media programming, and greater agility in adapting to new changes required by the business.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is the technology sector dedicated to protecting organizations and individuals from cyber threats that could potentially leak sensitive information or hurt the business in any way. It can involve securing network connections, strengthening passwords, setting up best security practices in company culture, and more.
Why Is Cybersecurity a Challenge?
During the third quarter of 2022, internet users worldwide saw approximately 15 million data breaches, and the threat continues into 2023. The greatest challenge is knowing how to keep your data safe while being able to innovate and grow.
How Can We Address This Challenge?
The first step is to know your company’s risk profile. Analyze your applications, networks, connections, hardware access vulnerabilities, and risks company-wide in the physical world, on your servers, and on the cloud. Only when you know the full picture can you prioritize and tackle each security threat one at a time.
The second step involves redesigning and implementing security measures for these existing vulnerabilities, which will involve various meetings with key decision-makers.
The third step is changing company culture to take cybersecurity more seriously and enacting policies like an ethical phishing policy can help raise awareness among everyone and help them make better decisions with keeping security in mind.
The fourth step is to maintain security measures in a sustainable and automated way and continually stay updated on new security threats in the news to get ahead of them.
Recession
The 2022 recession brought on new worries for businesses as the GDP receded into the negative for longer than two consecutive quarters during the summer of 2022.
Why Is the Recession a Challenge?
With this recession, some businesses have found it more challenging to generate their usual profit and needed to reduce costs, whether that was in innovation, marketing, employee salaries and count, or any other overhead. But businesses also face the challenge of the future, where the recession can become worse or some other new, unknowable threat may affect the economy.
How Can We Address This Challenge?
The best way to adapt to any unexpected economic change is to be as adaptable as possible. Learn how to reduce bureaucracy, automate processes to reduce cost and resources, increase efficiency for faster deployment, and improve client relationships and experiences to keep them loyal when buying rates are low.
The Agile methodology allows businesses to become more flexible and adaptable to change, reduces development errors, creates a better understanding of your clients’ needs, and orientates teams to client needs. The agile methodology breaks up a project into manageable phases to create a more iterative approach to completing projects. So instead of taking years to create the perfect product before launching, the agile methodology encourages organizations to quickly create a working product, send out the first version, and iterate to better versions quickly after that.
Agile transformation is just one of many business transformations a company can adopt to hedge against recession. Another is updating change management by adopting new systems, creating an acceptance of change in the work culture, and bringing in new styles of management and leadership to adapt to harder times.
The Future of Work
In 2022, we saw remote work become more popular with employees, and in 2023, we will most likely see a mix of hybrid work because 50% of employees prefer some form of remote work, while most executives prefer more of an in-office lifestyle. The rise of quiet quitting is forcing companies to rethink how they are engaging with their employees, while younger generations care more about value alignment with their employees. All of these technological, social, and generational shifts affect the future of work.
Why Is the Future of Work a Challenge?
Even though many employees prefer remote work, maintaining company culture and reducing quiet quitting remains a challenge in remote cultures. This is where executives will have to decide whether to go back to the office, create a hybrid work culture, or find more creative ways to maintain company culture with full-remote employees.
How Can We Address This Challenge?
The overall focus of the future of work will involve engagement between employers and employees. Maintaining a strong company culture requires exposure, clear foundational values, and creating an environment of trust and psychological safety. Clear communication will be key, and that can be accomplished with unified messaging, clear context, explicit policies, and most likely, repetition of knowledge.
Metaverse
The metaverse is a hypothetical virtual world whose usage is still being debated and experimented with. Some believe it is gaming, while others believe it will be used for simulations or research and development for corporations.
Why Is the Metaverse a Challenge?
First, you must decide whether you want to dedicate resources to experimenting with the metaverse. The upside is that as an early adopter, you can gain an advantage if the metaverse becomes successful. The downside is that we do not know if the metaverse will be successful. Second, if you decide to enter the metaverse, what would you use it for?
How Can We Address This Challenge?
The first step would be to understand the metaverse’s benefits, costs, and applications. Currently, the metaverse is being used or experimented with for virtual work meetings, product simulators, research, and development platforms, virtual training, and connected VR experiences. Companies like Siemens have been using the virtual world to design, model, and test factories by creating a “digital twin” factory with virtual machines, people, robots, and materials to find the best mix of equipment and processes to use before implementing it in the real world.
The cost of joining the metaverse would involve dedicated labor resources to work on your projects and the computational costs of powering your virtual project in the metaverse, which can be done with cloud services or your own.
Takeaways
CTOs face unique challenges in 2023 from a technological, social, economic, and cultural front. However, many can be solved by first understanding the unique needs and improvements of your organization and developing an effective plan of action. Often, it is easier and faster to consult professionals who have helped companies solve these challenges before.
At Baufest, we provide discovery sessions with our solution experts to work with your businesses’ specific needs to prepare your business for the inevitable changes of the upcoming year. Book a discovery session anytime with us.