1 Ongoing turbulence from Covid, Brexit and climate change
“Market turbulence has always been a key feature in business planning, but the pronounced impacts and risks arising from the pandemic, global geo-politics and the climate crisis means that businesses will need to be increasingly more agile and responsive to disruptive change. From our perspective this means enabling clients to deliver increasingly composable business and technology architectures that allow them to rapidly respond to these opportunities and threats.”
Tom Lawson – chief executive
2 AWS to force Azure or Google Cloud to fold
“Either Azure or Google Cloud will fold as Amazon continues to dominate the cloud hosting space. The increased acceptance of remote working will lead to the working day becoming more diffuse. Work will become more about collectively iterating outputs at various points during the day than people getting together at the same time for meetings.”
David Sarginson – head of software development
3 Simpler, more agile solutions to augment existing systems
“The accelerated pace of digital transformation and a shortage of the requisite advanced technical skills are two factors driving organisations to consider alternative ways of meeting the unprecedented demand for change to their systems and services. As a result, we’ll see more companies adopting no-code, low-code, robotic process automation and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) technologies as part of their overall response, targeting suitable use cases to rapidly deliver simpler, agile solutions that augment the capabilities of their existing systems and data.”
Lee Foster – chief technology officer
4 Connectivity to define device success
“We are moving into an era of software-defined everything, with many categories such as the ‘internet of things’ starting to lose any meaning. Software and connectivity will define the abilities of all devices, real and virtual, to process and react to information.”
Paul Crisp – enterprise architect.
5 DevSecOps to rise in prominence
“Development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) will become even more prominent. The recent security nightmares plaguing the extensively used Log4j library will only strengthen the need for automated dependency scanning as part of continuous integration pipelines, and adopting defensive platform patterns such as zero trust architecture. Site reliability engineering and observability will continue to gain converts as organisations try to increase their responsiveness to production issues before real problems occur.”
Adam Coles – head of engineering.
6 Designers challenged more on ethical impact
“We will see a re-focusing on the needs we design for. Users, yes, but designers will be challenged more and more to consider their impact more broadly on humanity, society, ethics, and the planet.”
Emily Allinson – head of user-centred design
7 Hybrid debate to find the best work balance
“We’re all going to be wrestling with hybrid working in 2022. That’s the combo of home and office, plus the configuration of office with different modes for different levels of concentration or collaboration. Physical office space will be hugely important but on a fractional basis, with part days for different modes. But I also feel for the newbies and learners. You can’t learn many work experiences on the end of a 2D Zoom call. 2022 is Back to Live!”
Charlie Hoult – founder
8 Tech job candidates in the driving seat
“The most significant change we’ve seen across the UK in the tech sector is the levelling of salaries. Never before have we seen such a candidate-driven market – and the psychology between candidates and employers has completely shifted. Employers will have to work harder to drive their employee value proposition and open the door to their culture and values. Organisations will wrap their arms around their people to retain them, increasing notice periods and ensuring their people experience is at the heart of their retention strategy.”
Lorna Madden – head of recruitment
9 Push on innovation and collaboration on skills
“We’re going to see a lot of innovation in ways that employers collaborate to tackle skills shortages. We are already seeing some models emerging where consortia of government technology suppliers are working together and there is also activity convened by regional authorities to deliver place-based collaborative programmes. This is exactly what is needed and has the potential to deliver significant social value with programmes focused on inclusion and diversity.”
Cate Kalson – chief people officer
10 Firms that greenwash will be found out
“The coming years will be more about better thinking around users and customer interaction than it will be about software. We have to work out when people are needed in the process and when computers can automate and link data, offering the whole story end to end. We also need a massive shift in how we make systems secure and resilient. Most corporations will sadly never change – on diversity, inclusion, environmental and social impact they will greenwash and be found out.”
Mike O’Brien – founder.
