2024 Predictions by the EQengineered Team
What is your best prediction for enterprise organizations negotiating digital transformation/modernization in 2024?
“I expect a few directions that organizations will begin or continue through 2024, including:
- Continued migration toward the cloud. Organizations will continue to be drawn toward the flexibility and scalability offered by the cloud and cloud-native solutions.
- Improved Data Privacy. Organizations will continue to be impacted by cyber attacks and will continue to look for ways to limit their exposure and improve confidence in their offerings in conjunction with ensuring continued compliance with global privacy regulations.
- Machine Learning and AI will trend toward becoming ubiquitous over the next couple of years. AI will play a significant role in helping organizations gain a competitive edge while enabling enhanced user experience and improved data analytics.”
Russ Harding, Director of Engineering & Microsoft Practice Lead
“In 2024 I expect to see enterprise organizations taking a critical look at the effectiveness of existing methodologies. Change is inevitable, and thoughtful implementation of even the smallest process adjustment will pay big dividends as long as teams continue to keep communication at the forefront of their digital transformation and modernization strategies! My recommendation is to focus on what is needed and adjust expectations accordingly.”
Margo Rabchenuk, Director of Project Management
“Large Language Model and Generative AI based tools would become more pervasive in the enterprise and integrated in many workflows in areas like image generation, data analysis, and software development. However, organizations would need to be careful about some of the issues raised by these technologies, for example around security, accuracy, bias, and copyright infringement.”
Ranjan Bhattacharya, Chief Data Officer
“Digital organizations undergoing transformations in 2024 are going to avoid implementing custom AI solutions or fine-tuning models for their organizations, as they will find a lack of clarity around return on investment. They will instead look for third-party AI services that enhance the effectiveness or speed of existing initiatives.”
Ed Lyons, Principal Technical Consultant/Architect
“Enterprise organizations will come to realize in 2024 that digital transformation is an ongoing journey rather than a one time goal. Having already improved operational efficiencies to offset the costs of inflation and rising interest rates the past two years, organizations will turn to AI, machine learning, and analytics to innovate and uncover new opportunities. Strategic initiatives will include securing their supply chains, as well as mitigating the market, operational, and financial risks associated with the international uncertainties arising from today’s (and tomorrow’s) growing geopolitical conflicts.”
Kevin Wagner, Principal Data Engineering Consultant/Architect
“My prediction for enterprise organizations negotiating digital transformation/modernization in 2024 is that it will become incredibly important for enterprises to capitalize on the new tooling and efficiencies provided by AI tools like Copilot in order to maximize on their investments. Enterprises that invest in AI tooling will be able to achieve their technology goals with less friction and focus on their core business competencies.”
Jennifer Parker, Principal Technical Consultant/Architect
“Personalization will become a requirement for enterprise organizations seeking to develop and deepen relationships with prospective and existing customers. In 2024, this translates to ensuring content marketing is authentic and consistent. The use of generative AI can be leveraged, but only in pursuit of expanding original thinkings and insights.”
Rachel Mezzatesta, Vice President | Marketing
“As automation, artificial intelligence, and data integrations continue to show great promise, enterprises focused on modernization will need to understand 'the basics' to ensure that they are poised to take advantage of these advancements. 2024 will likely see renewed focus on cleaning up existing data models, transitioning to mainstream languages and frameworks with greater integrations and community support, and a renewed emphasis on human capital and brand identity. This will help enterprises build a foundation and clear the path to extracting the most value from these game-changing tools.”
Allen Fordham, Senior Project Management Consultant
“Any forward-looking enterprise will have to sustain or accelerate their 2024 (and beyond) growth based on their past experiences, which are buried into vast amounts of past enterprise data. Till 2023, there was no easy, organized and efficient way to glean insights from the past data and capture important pointers to the future. Now using GAI in a ethical, safe and secure way in a corporate VPC, this will be possible. The ability to help enterprises to glean and extract important information (digitization/modernization) from the past data, in a safe and organized way, will be an important asset for any consulting company and an important differentiator, especially in the small-medium consulting space.”
Utpal Datta, Principal Technical Consultant
“2024 promises to be a year where cutting edge AI continues to dominate tech conversations. Enterprises busy tackling modernization will likely find themselves trying to make sense of future possibilities yet having to do it with the perspective of their own idiosyncratic challenges. There is real promise that revolutions in tooling may come to the aid of longstanding modernization challenges. At the same time enterprise transformation responds best to methodical and consistent approaches that target the most meaningful problems in the most thorough way.”
Julian Flaks, Chief Technology Officer
“There is a lot of innovation ahead of us. As AI engines become easier to integrate with enterprise data stores, strategies for usage will become clearer and more mainstream. Cloud computing will continue to grow. And the benefits and realities of quantum computing should become more clear. An exciting time to be in this industry!”
Phil Denoncourt, Principal Technical Consultant/Architect
“I predict that the need for digital transformation will continue to be very strong in 2024. Companies who already have their processes digitized will need to re-assess them and upgrade them to ensure they continue to provide the value they were meant to provide in the first place. I think the trend of people working from home at least for more than 50% of their working time is here to stay, and it will continue to create even more digital transformation needs.CIOs and CTOs are going to really look into their Cloud costs and diversify their vendors if it means saving money, and I foresee more companies using multiple clouds which will cause more challenges for connectivity, security and programming.
In 2023, most companies have been standing on the side-line when it came to using generative AI to increase productivity since the risks of using it are still hard to control or understand; but in 2024, I think the expertise to control and optimize generative AI technology is going to grow. Increased usage of generative AI technology will prove its value ( or lack thereof, if not handled properly).
Looking forward to a bright 2024, full of new technology challenges!”Anne Lewson, Director of Program Management & Consulting Services
“2024 will see continued adoption of cloud services to enable enterprise flexibility and allow the enterprise to focus on core competence.
In addition, AI Integration along with automation will help the enterprise focus on core competence whilst also unravelling opportunities. Data-driven decision-making will thus be much more of a real time experience.
These shifts will mean cybersecurity will be even more critical to organizations as more of their core data will potentially beexposed to security vunerabilities.
Companies while doing all this will have to be eco-aware. Compute power affects our living environment immensely, and there will be more focus on what we as the global west can do to reduce our eco footprint. Our modernization cannot come at the cost of our planet.”
Kenneth Akpan, Principal Technical Consultant/Architect
“In 2024, I predict that enterprise organizations undergoing digital transformation/modernization will increasingly focus on integrating and leveraging AI tools to enhance organizational productivity.”
Dakota Kim, Principal Technical Consultant
“I predict there will be more investment towards enterprise internal generative AI tooling. Companies will look for ways to get the most out of their data while keeping it private. Private instances of tools like co-pilot will be more and more common.”
William Ramirez, Senior Technical Consultant
“With the importance of customer experience, implementing technologies like CRM systems, personalization tools, and analytics platforms will take priority to better understand and serve customer needs.”
Yuxin Wang, Principal Technical Consultant
“In 2024, I think there will be greater adoption of human centric design to enhance workplace satisfaction, collaboration, and efficiency through technology solutions and digital platforms.”
Rachael Guay, Principal UI/UX Design Consultant
“My predictions for 2024 are for organizations to continue focusing on migrating their mission critical operations to cloud based and managed services solutions. As fraudsters become more sophisticated in their attacks, Cybersecurity will also continue to be a huge focus in 2024 as organizations strive to stay ahead of potential threats.”
Mark Smith, Principal Project Management Consultant
“2024 will witness key trends in enterprises negotiating digital transformation/modernization, namely:
1. The capture, sharing and transference of enterprise digital knowledge capital will become a key priority to enable legacy know-how to persist and remain actionable for rising digital enterprise leaders.This should include proactive succession planning and job shadowing programs with those that have worked through the web, mobile, multi-channel and current AI/ML period(s).
2. The digital interface with become a priority for leading firms - patterns and best practices will emerge, and customer experiences will improve dramatically.
3. Customer engagement - prospective and existing - will demand renewed focus to ensure interactions are permissioned, in-context, and valuable for enterprise audiences.
4. Cloud migration will be a focal point for the enterprise, led by moving database assets first.
5. Enterprises with a strategy focused on continual improvement - related to people, process, tools, technology, data, and experience - will fully embrace agile practices. This will deliver sustained benefit to enterprise organizations that embrace a disciplined and measurement-based approach to their digital strategy.
2024 Insight | Key Take Away: People-centricity is the key to supporting creativity, leadership, critical thinking, communication, complex problem solving, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and empathy. With AI saturation just ahead, quantum computing on the horizon, and other potential game changing digital and technology innovations just over the horizon, enabling your employees and their mode of learning and developing alongside a repeatable process-based approach will deliver results.”
Mark Hewitt, President & CEO