This blog lists IDC’s top 10 worldwide predictions for IT and Business Services. These predictions are meant to help the enterprise with strategic planning within a typical five-year business planning cycle.
Services are provided by outside suppliers to companies seeking to plan, implement, and manage their IT and business initiatives. IDC surveys consistently show that most companies will work with an outside firm, whether a consulting firm, systems integrator, managed services provider, the services arm of a hardware or software provider, a cloud services provider, or a myriad of other companies, as they seek to leverage technology to bring about increased business value. Given the widening gap between needed and available skills, IDC sees the trend toward leveraging outside help to continue.
Companies utilizing the services of outside firms should assess the degree to which these partners themselves have evolved to be able to address their needs now and in the future. Key assessment areas should be:
- Greater use of analytics and intelligent automation, and platforms for service delivery
- Greater understanding of the needs of the lines of business (LOBs) even in IT-centric engagements, as well as key functions such as HR
- Ability to facilitate change management and address the impact of the new initiative on the company’s people
- Ability to address the broadening scope of IT into operational technology
IDC’s worldwide services predictions for 2020 cover the broad landscape of services markets from strategy consulting services to managed services, including a variety of emerging technologies. It examines topics such as the impact of the IT skills gap, the need for IT process transformation, artificial intelligence (AI)-delivered services, and the impact of technologies like Internet of Things (IoT). For each worldwide services prediction, IDC’s analysts provide an assessment of the key impacts on IT and guidance on how to prepare for the coming changes.
The predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Worldwide Services are:
- Prediction #1: By 2022, the financial impact of the IT skills gap will grow to $775 billion worldwide, from $302 billion in 2019, as a result of delayed release of products/service, missed revenue, or increased cost.
- Prediction #2: By 2022, 75% of IT organizations will have undergone process transformation to adopt DX-enabled processes, such as Agile development, impacting 80% of processes and affecting 90% of their IT employees.
- Prediction #3: By 2023, 47% of the services that organizations receive will be delivered via a mix of non-AI and AI-enabled automation. At this time, AI-enabled automation will represent 20% of total automation spend.
- Prediction #4: By 2023, a quarter of all organizations will begin implementing a strategy for enterprise-wide “innovation at scale”.
- Prediction #5: By 2022, 78% of enterprises will partner with technology services vendors that can orchestrate various technology innovations into business use cases to drive transformation at scale.
- Prediction #6: By 2024, 55% of organizations modernizing their legacy mainframe applications will have modernized the underlying application infrastructure, with 83% turning to cloud as their preferred medium.
- Prediction #7: By 2021, 41% of all enterprises will invest in an (or upgrade an existing) employee onboarding system to improve their employee engagement and retention by up to 80%.
- Prediction #8: By 2025, 75% of software and hardware technology product companies will outsource some or all parts of their product life-cycle function as they grapple with talent shortage and shrinking R&D budgets.
- Prediction #9: By 2023, 60% of organizations that have adopted 3rd Platform solutions will seek new services from third-party suppliers, requiring service businesses to reskill 20% of their workforces.
- Prediction #10: By 2025, enterprise IT organizations will spend over $10 billion on the deployment and maintenance of non-IT devices in the Internet of Things, supporting everything that can be sensored and monitored.
For more context and deeper insights around these and any of our other worldwide technology predictions, click here to explore our IDC FutureScape Web Conferences.
You can find full context around these predictions in the newly published document, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Services Predictions.
