Gartner Releases Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, 2017

Gartner Releases Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, 2017
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Digital business execution is requiring more frequent and complex decision making, continuous problem solving and rapid pattern recognition, all of which require workforce digital dexterity, according to new Hype Cycle by Gartner.

In most organizations, however, responsibility for helping employees develop the desire and ability to exploit a wide range of transformative technologies, highlighted in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace, 2017, does not have to rest with any group or individual. The Hype Cycle can help application leaders identity and exploit new and existing technologies that will boost employee engagement and agility for better business outcomes.

"Humans will still be at the center of work, even as intelligent software and machines become our co-workers. CIOs must anticipate how trends in business, society, technology and information will converge to change where, when, why and with whom we work," said Matt Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "CIOs must expand their charter to include workforce digital dexterity.

Among technologies that will have a transformational impact in the next two to five years, Gartner states that most effect will be made with augmented data discovery and personal analytics.

Augmented data discovery can reduce time-consuming exploration and the false identification of less relevant insights. Segments, clusters, outliers and relationships are automatically applied to the data, and only the most statistically significant and relevant results are presented to the user in smart visualizations and/or natural-language narrations that are optimized, based on the user's context.

Personal analytics examples include virtual health assistants, financial advice assistants and shopping assistants. This sector of the virtual assistant market will reach mainstream adoption by 2020. Organizations can benefit from personal analytics by using the data collected to personalize products and services, and to deepen and extend customer relationships, or to assist with planning future services that meet new customer requirements.

Obstacles to the adoption of personal analytics include the challenge of integrating personal ecosystems of sensors and data feeds associated with individual users, as well as the business models required to support product development and marketing.

Among technologies that will have a transformational impact in the next five to ten years are conversational user interfaces and virtual assistants.

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a high-level design model in which user and machine interactions primarily occur in the user's spoken or written natural language. CUIs had huge growth in 2017, with chatbots, messaging platforms and virtual speakers contributing to the boom. The explosion in the availability of conversational platforms is making CUIs an alternative to graphical user interfaces.

Virtual assistants use artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist users or automate tasks. VAs' importance will grow as society moves into the post-app era in the next five years. It is unlikely that the VA market will have a single market leader, due to the fragmentation of ecosystems, but the major technology providers, such as Apple with Siri, Google with Google Assistant and Microsoft with Cortana, are likely to remain dominant.