What does technology mean to you? What should technology do for you? But even more importantly, how well do you understand what technology can do or not do for you and your business?
Technology continues to drive the growth and development of matured and fast-growing economies around the world. As everything becomes increasingly interconnected, the way we conduct business, work and play is radically changing. More than anything else, and as societies emerge into the era of data responsibility, the African environment will need to become a social, ecological and economic ecosystem driven by data and the discipline of data analytics.
Committed to the development and emergence of new technologies, IBM Research teams in universities and IBM laboratories in Africa and around the world are embedding data and artificial, or augmented intelligence (AI) to change how work is done. Similarly, future-focused business leaders are pondering on how to move their enterprises into the cognitive era of machine learning and AI. Every 25 years or so, a new technology architecture emerges, which changes the way businesses operate and can often transform entire industries.
For example, mainframes were the first technology architecture when they were introduced in the 1950s. They enabled industries, such as manufacturing and financial services, to automate processes, which continues today. The technology architecture changed the business architecture because mainframes enabled organizations to use shared services and grow from local to global operations.
The production of microprocessors beginning in the early 1970s enabled the invention of the personal computer about a decade later, which provided computing power at the fingertips of business people, changing the way they worked.
In the 1990s, the World Wide Web led to the invention of new ways of selling and doing business over the Internet. What we call cloud computing today started out as network-centric computing two decades ago. Now smart devices attached through the Internet to massive cloud data centers have spurred digital businesses in many industries.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), revenues for big data and analytics in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region totaled $1.98 billion in 2016, was expected to reach $2.2 billion by end of 2017 and is forecast to reach approximately $3.20 billion in 2020, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.0% over the 2016-20 period.
Industry analysts say Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE jointly account for about 58% of this big data analytics investment in the MEA region, while companies and public-sector institutions in West Africa’s leading economies, namely, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Nigeria, seem to be in the forefront of this regional digital transformation drive, as exemplified by their progressive policies and fast-growing financial services sector.
These developments point to one fact: we’re right in the middle of an ongoing technology architecture evolution that will result in new business architectures.
As organizations now deal with massive amounts of data, the combination with artificial, or augmented intelligence (AI), is creating the next technology architecture, which is once again changing the way business is conducted. The combination is creating businesses that operate based upon intelligence, not just information, and such intelligence can grow exponentially.
Companies of all sizes and across all industries are seizing upon this opportunity. In fact, global spending on AI-related hardware and software is expected to exceed $57.6 billion in 2021, as compared with the $12 billion that was spent in 2017, according to IDC.
Insights from AI workloads require new hardware and software paradigms and the infrastructure to deliver data-driven workloads. If the amount of data in the world was considered “big” before, the volume of data required to train a deep learning model is almost unfathomable. The processing power required to operate high-performance analytics that lead to insights dwarfs anything that has come before.
While 20% of all the data in the world is searchable, 80% is not and may be comprised of videos, pictures or even social media. AI is helping organizations tap into the 80% — or what’s called unstructured data — and combine it with the searchable data to create competitive advantages.
Once again, the technology architecture is changing along with the business architecture and creating a new system of platforms for not only how work gets done, but how separate organization’s platforms interact in an ecosystem of platforms.
Enterprises in Africa need not play catch up anymore with the rest of the world. The same technology is available to every company, big or small, especially as tech solutions and services can now be delivered on premises, off premises and over the cloud as a service. Companies that have not started their AI journey should consider doing so quickly or they risk being left behind.
Here are five key technology strategies for organizations to consider when transforming their businesses through the use of AI:
- Determine the organization’s core expertise and what factors will differentiate it from its competition.
- Learn to curate the organization’s own data — and data from other sources — that will help differentiate its technical architecture and business platforms.
- Recognize that technical architectures matter when designing an organization’s platform for the future.
- Become an agile organization, which means blurring the boundaries between business and technology architectures and employees, business partners and others in the organization’s ecosystem.
- Be secure to the core of a business because the security of data can fundamentally differentiate an organization from its competitors.
The era of AI not only demands more than tremendous processing power and unprecedented speed, but also requires an open ecosystem of innovative companies to deliver technologies and tools. I believe this new technology architecture will help to fuel industry transformation and generate even more discoveries that benefit the world.
