Hyland: Six enterprise technology trends driving growth in 2020

Organisations around the world will accelerate enterprise technology investment in 2020, leveraging digital improvements to make them more competitive, improve connections with consumers, and keep up with the increasing demands of privacy regulation and security needs.

Hyland, a leading content services provider for organisations across the globe, has identified six technology trends that will drive these improvements and demand the attention of chief information officers (CIOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) in the coming year and beyond.

"In order to gain a competitive edge and amplify growth, organisations are striving to improve customer experiences, streamline operations and mitigate risk," says Hyland president and CEO Bill Priemer.

"To meet those goals through the next decade, our customers are increasingly focused on cloud-based solutions, new blockchain use cases and intelligent automation technology such as robotic process automation.

The six trends Hyland experts identified as attracting the attention of enterprise technology leaders are:

Organisations will opt for managed cloud services to increase security and efficiency. Because hosting solutions in a public cloud requires extensive internal oversight, CIOs and CTOs see the value in outsourcing the management and hosting of their cloud infrastructure to experts who handle:

• Backing up data and implementing the latest security measures
• Maintaining and updating solutions to ensure compliance with national and international regulations
• Disaster recovery
• Scaling solutions up or down as data needs fluctuate

The proliferation of national, international and even state-wide data and privacy regulations — such as GDPR, Australia's Privacy Amendment Act  and the California Consumer Privacy Act — is forcing organisations to rethink the way they manage and protect information.

As the stakes for companies to comply continue to rise, so will the challenge to keep up with the ever-changing regulations.

Keeping data in perpetuity is no longer an option. As a result, organisations are investing in enterprise technology like content services solutions to automate document retention and records management policies.

As business processes generate more and more data, and digital transactions increase, the need for transparency and authentication will grow.

Blockchain is an increasingly viable way to provide those assurances across industries, from higher education to mortgage lending.

The strong yet unpredictable economy will drive organisations to seek efficiencies today so they can be more nimble and competitive in the future.

In the same way manufacturers have used technology to improve efficiency on the factory floor, organisations in every industry will focus on reducing the cost and complexity of business processes by improving the efficiency of knowledge workers in the back office. Areas such as accounts payable and other transactional departments are now looking to second-or third-generation solutions that intelligently automate processes.

Fifty-two percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in the year 2000 no longer exist due to bankruptcy, mergers and acquisitions, or other reasons.

This pace of change will accelerate, as the rise of intelligent automation technology will create new sources of revenue, leading to the rise of new companies and the demise of others.

Robotic process automation will allow "digital workers" to toil around the clock at blinding speeds — complementing human workers and eliminating the most tedious, repetitive manual tasks.

Machine learning and AI will augment the productivity of knowledge workers by driving more processes and making more contextual decisions, freeing up employees to focus on the highest value tasks.

With the rise of consumerisation and the expectation for rapid response in every interaction, organisations are looking to speed up processes in order to improve employee and customer experiences — and thereby gain a competitive edge.

Content services technology will play a critical role in organisations' quest to deliver better experiences to the people they serve.