Top 5 IT Innovation Projects Your Enterprise Must Undertake In 2022

The last several years of a pandemic, remote workforce, and supply chain challenges, among other events, show enterprises the importance of innovation. We can interpret innovation in many ways, so we’ll focus on digital innovation. Although digital transformation and digital innovation are two sides of the same coin, they are vastly different sides to the process of achieving specific business outcomes.

A recent Harvard Digital Science Review (HDSR) article explains why a holistic approach to digital transformation and innovation is necessary for success. In the article, the author explains why the fear of missing out (FOMO) can lead to poor transformation decisions. 

This can leave the business with technology that is not focused on specific business outcomes. The bigger problem is that it leaves them without the vision for innovative possibilities that can deliver that business ROI.

Innovation is about using or creating something that is disruptive. That can be a product, service or process that shifts your business, and possibly your sector paradigm, so It’s about more than the technology used or created.

Every leading enterprise wants to see the innovation possibilities that they can realize through properly choosing, implementing, and using that technology. The key is to bring tangible and targeted business outcome value in new and reimagined ways that benefit your organization, your operations, and your customers.

These forward-thinking enterprises see innovation as the catalyst driving clear business outcomes that make them market disruptors. It also gives them the ability to pivot to meet changing needs. This enables them to meet change head on with very little impact to internal and external end users and customers. This blog will look at five IT innovation projects that SMBs and enterprises must put in place in 2022 for success.

Trend #1: Distributed Infrastructure

It is the cloud that provides the means to make innovation part of a company’s DNA. But it requires taking a holistic distributed infrastructure approach to how you use the cloud and associated projects to achieve targeted results through innovation. This is about much more than a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy with other components like APIs, containers, and microservices.

A distributed infrastructure architecture is a means for your business to ensure that these digital transformation components serve a defined single purpose. In this approach to digital innovation, it fuses all channels and applications into connectivity and collaboration platforms.

We’ve achieved somewhere near 70 percent of companies implementing hybrid or multi-cloud platforms, which serve as the foundation of distributed IT infrastructure, according to McKinsey. Only a fraction of those total businesses have the holistic focus to turn that digital transformation into digital innovation.

The ability to see achievable visions of possibilities that disrupt your current market is a hallmark of innovation. This puts you in the position of being a leader in terms of services and products that achieve increased agility and revenue growth. By 2023, 7 percent of organizations that effectively apply distributed infrastructure principles will see as much as 25 percent faster growth than competitors, according to Gartner.

Trend #2: Composable Applications

We rarely talk about composable applications, but this approach to applications as business-centric modular components drives innovation in the same ways as our other four trends. Composable applications make it easier to use and reuse code to speed up the time to market for new software solutions that deliver enterprise value. The ability to create a distributed infrastructure sets the stage for composable applications where the enterprise has immediate access to:

• Computing
• Storage, and applications
• Developers and skill sets
• CI/CD pipelines

The goal is to have the ongoing flexibility to fit separate application blocks together to scale storage, databases, networks, and computation functionality through:

• Infrastructure-as-an-application (IaaS)
• Infrastructure automation
• Multi-cloud approach

With APIs as the core element, enterprises can think in terms of innovation for specific business outcomes of new services and products. They can also have real-time adaptability, agility, and resilience to meet sudden market or socioeconomic shifts. This enables your enterprise to quickly create and vet applications that can deliver new services or products to the market.

Trend #2: Hyperautomation

The ability to innovate in 2022 and beyond will be determined by an enterprise’ ability to identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation will speed up tasks and accuracy for faster decision making, which is fundamental to innovation.

Hyperautomation enables scalability, speed, and remote operation that drive business model disruption. This plays out in terms of targeted business outcomes of streamlined IT and OT, IoT, Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud native application development, and decision intelligence, among many others.

Trend #3: Cloud-Native Platforms

The ability to respond to rapid change is about anticipating disruption in the marketplace, as well as disruptive innovation opportunities. This use of cloud native platforms and architectures is an innovation project that every business should already be implementing in 2022. The ability to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile through cloud- native development is part of a holistic approach that includes distributed infrastructure and hyperautomation.

Trend #4: AI Engineering and Applied AI/ML

Using A/I ML, deep learning (DL) and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) are all innovation projects that every enterprise must undertake in 2022. But that pursuit will not lead to ROI or innovation unless they are part of defined AI business outcomes. That could mean many things depending on the vision that your business has for its future, such as:

• Part of new app models
• A means for faster app architecture construction
• Deeper insights into customer, machine, system, or process behaviors
• The overall ability to harness data for decision making from IoT platforms
• Computer vision
• Intelligent and adaptable security

There is nearly an inexhaustible list of possibilities with AI/ML when applied to specific business outcomes. Our four other Innovation project trends can all benefit from AI/ML in various ways depending on your specific goals of innovation in:

• Products
• Services
• Operations
• Customer experience
• Cost reduction, and more

There are many other opportunities for true ROI from innovation. We’ve already hinted at its crucial importance to data intelligence and decision intelligence, which is our #4 innovation project. While the possibilities are endless, enterprises must think about where they want to go as innovators and disruptors and how they want to prepare themselves to be innovative and agile in the face of disruptive events.

Trend #5: Decision Intelligence and analytics platforms

If operations and IT are the engine that drives every business, and data is the fuel that powers the vehicle, business intelligence, decision intelligence and analytics are the GPS that guides it all. While your people are behind the wheel, analytics and decision intelligence platforms are crucial to the road you take.

Innovation should always be a destination rather than a detour. With analytics platforms focused on the right business outcomes, you can turn each decision into a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from, and refine decisions.

The Importance of An Innovation Partner

It should be clear that all these projects are part of a holistic approach to innovation and rely on one another to attain the ROI of specific business outcomes today and tomorrow. The digital transformation aspects of implemented technologies present obvious challenges for enterprises.

Things become far more complicated when you integrate that digital transformation with digital innovation outcomes. This must happen at the start of the transformation process, so you must create a business where innovation is part of the DNA of the people, processes, and technology.

It’s challenging for any enterprise to put all the pieces of technology, expertise, planning, and implementation together internally. It often takes an expert partner at innovation to collaborate with your enterprise to help develop a vision of unlimited possibilities.

At Techolution, our teams have worked as end-to-end partners and fractionally to help enterprises see their unlimited possibilities of innovation and then focus on specific business outcomes to make them a reality. To see how Techolution can be your innovation partner in 2020 and beyond, visit our Services Page.