As part of APMdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how Digital Transformation will evolve and impact business in 2020.

Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions

Start with 2020 ITSM Predictions

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION URGENCY CONTINUES

In 2019, we've seen growing urgency around digital transformation, and I fully expect that to continue into 2020.
Bob Davis
CMO, Plutora

TIMELINES DOUBLE

Through 2021, digital transformation initiatives will take large traditional enterprises, on average, twice as long and cost twice as much as anticipated. Large organizations will struggle with digital innovation as they recognize the challenges of technology modernization and the costs of simplifying operational interdependence. Smaller, more agile organizations, by contrast, will have an opportunity to be first to market as larger organizations exhibit lackluster immediate benefits.
Gartner Top Strategic Predictions for 2020 and Beyond

PREVENTING FAILURE

After experiencing billions in losses in 2019 on failed Digital Transformation initiatives, the C Suite will look internally for more answers to avoid more losses and realize benefits of the current investments. The focus on implementing new tools for better predictability and planning around security, agility and costs will be magnified. We will see more movement in 2020 to not only fail, find and fix fast but building artificial intelligence to predict and prevent failure to begin with across business and technology.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

FOCUS ON ROI

Businesses to wise up in 2020 and stop jumping on the latest tech train without evaluating ROIs —
For the past few years, companies have scrambled to follow the latest tech trends, forgoing ROI assessments in frantic attempts to modernize. $1.3 trillion was spent on digital transformation last year, but it's estimated 70% of those investments went to waste. Moving every application and dataset into the cloud or applying serverless computing to every workload isn't always the best move — and I anticipate we'll see businesses finally applying lessons learned from their overeagerness in 2020. It's not fiscally responsible to incorporate every last tech trend; none of them are magic bullets to digital transformation. Businesses are going to have to be more strategic, customizing their plans to their business objectives and culture, and placing emphasis on accelerated time to value over long-term, moonshot ideas.
Ed Macosky
SVP of Product & Solutions, Boomi, a Dell Technologies business

FOCUS ON APP PERFORMANCE AND DEVELOPMENT

In 2020 enterprises — tired of the delays in becoming truly digital — will heighten their focus on application performance and development to help accelerate digital transformation. In doing so, enterprises will be looking for tools to merge still useful legacy applications with cloud-native applications. Their goal will be to create an integrated software architecture delivering improved performance and a better digital customer experience, without prohibitive costs. They will seek ways of eclipsing the development cycle to bring applications to market faster, mindful of the fact that "digital transformation" itself is a moving target. The needs of lines of business and the expectations of customers will change. To stay digitally competitive, enterprises will realize they must have a development framework that can respond to changing market demands at a far faster pace than even five years ago.
James Hanley
CEO, Crowd Machine

FOCUS ON VISIBILITY

Visibility will be vital to ensuring digital transformation efforts. I expect DevOps teams of all organizations to continue deploying microservices in higher volumes in 2020, putting enormous pressure on security and compliance teams to maintain security posture. Visibility into traffic streams to, from and between microservices will become critical to ensure organizations can monitor and secure these applications while meeting company standards for digital transformation.
Shane Buckley
President and Chief Operating Officer, Gigamon

REAL-TIME DATA COLLABORATION

Moving to the cloud was supposed to drive efficiency — providing unlimited processing power, storage, and scalability — and most enterprises were quick to jump in. However, with that migration comes today’s most crippling multi-cloud challenge —how to drive critical real-time data file collaboration between globally dispersed teams while avoiding outmoded, conventional file locking. In distributed environments, lacking real-time global file locking capabilities are causing not just technical, but real-world, business-level challenges: teams cannot collaborate in real-time on innovative solutions; business-critical deadlines are not being met; and key data and competitive information is not reaching all relevant stakeholders, leaving some in the dark. In 2020, a growing number of enterprises will therefore require cloud-native solutions that empower distributed teams to collaborate seamlessly, and in real time, on everyday files, irrespective of their geographic location.
Rich Weber
CPO, Panzura

CONTAINERS IMPACT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Container technology will have a significant impact on business transformation. While container technology may be new for the traditional enterprise, the impact it will have on business transformation over the coming years cannot be ignored. Containerization brings increased simplicity, consistency, and portability to production environments. This enables faster IT delivery and increases performance, arming businesses with a new agility that empowers them to respond to changing customer needs fast. Businesses that embrace the opportunity containerization offers will be taking a vital step towards transforming into bustling digital enterprises that can deliver innovative products and a top-notch customer experience. The traditional applications will be replaced by containerized cloud-native applications gradually. A new paradigm of microservice-based containerized open architecture is forming and will become the mainstream reference architecture for the enterprise applications.
Yinghua Qin
Sr. Manager of Software Engineering, Foglight R&D Team, Quest Software, Information Management Business Unit

EMPLOYEES DEMAND DIGITAL EMPOWERMENT

Employees will demand digital empowerment at work that is better than what they get for free at home. Consumer-led digital transformation is changing lives, there's no doubt, but organizations are still lagging in terms of materially improving the working lives of their people. Failing to meet expectations for digitally inspired personalization and collaboration — especially in an era of full employment for knowledge workers — will have grave business consequences and drive up attrition.
Sreedhar Veeramachaneni
CEO, SSTech

CHATBOTS ACROSS EVERY FUNCTION

Chatbots will become relevant across every function. Chatbots for employee self-help will become relevant, not just for IT, but across every part of the organization. In November and December of 2018, we conducted a survey to understand the market and what was happening with chatbots as it related to ITSM. What we found is that 62% of respondents told us that they were actively considering or looking at adding a chatbot for employee self help related to IT questions. And the reason why they were doing that was primarily that it was too complicated to find answers on their portals, it took too long, and there were too many portals so they didn't really know where to go. In September of 2019 we did a survey to expand beyond IT to see what was happening in other departments. We published a survey that was very specific to HR and, surprisingly, 59% of the respondents told us they were actively considering adding a chatbot to help with the HR self-help issue. And when we dug deeper to understand what was driving that, it was very much the same issues as IT was experiencing. Employees were having a hard time finding answers from HR, they didn't know where to go, and it was taking too long. The bottom line is that for both HR and IT it's easier to pick up the phone and call email for help. My prediction for 2020 is that chatbots will start having a presence across all of the functions within an enterprise, not just IT.
Pat Calhoun
CEO, Espressive

Still more predictions to come, including 2020 Network Performance Management Predictions next week.