There’s a number of trends out there that you should be considering and keeping your eye on, but don’t warrant an entire article this week. Let’s look at micro trends of 2019.

Workflow Automation

Too many employees spend days a week copying numbers from one spreadsheet to another, them complaining about how busy they are. Time to get busy automating, and then putting those employees to better use. Look out for tools like Microsoft’s Flow, Atlassian’s Jira Workflows, or investigate the products you use to see how they can work with other tools easily. A lot of online products have great integration.

Next Level Collaboration

Are you sending emails back and forth with your team? It’s so 1995! Online chat? What is this ICQ? Collaboration tools are here and they are taking your employee engagement to the next level. Check out Microsoft Teams and Yammer, Facebooks corporate options among others. Get your meetings organised, your teams working on the same data, and employees all around your business actively involved.

Microservices

Break those problems done to the smallest possible functions, develop them, pump them to the cloud and scale as necessary. It’s not quite as simple as point and click but if you have complex internal systems and are looking to rebuild, consider microservices architecture.

Internet of Things

Well this is one of the buzziest of buzz words. What does it even mean? Well take a device, put a sensor on it, log the data somewhere. That’s IoT…..kind of. Do you need IoT in your business? Maybe. The marketing talk would suggest everyone already has it, but that’s over estimating things. The biggest changes that make IoT possible is the rise of very small computers, with internet capabilities. Devices like RasberryPi’s and even Arduino’s allow lost cost, low powered computers that can be programmed to do things, like take sensor values and report them to centralised portal.

Data Analytics

If your report is in Excel, it’s not a report. If you have to spend time manipulating data into a presentable format, it’s not a report. If you are doing those things your not going to be able to take advantage of new opportunities around data analytics. Machine learning, AI, these are not in Excel. 2019 is the time to get away from Excel and build a reporting platform, start using proper data reporting and analytical tools. If you have no idea where to start. Grab PowerBI and go from there. It really is almost as simple as that.

Digital Transformation

Are you still interacting with your customers the same way you always have? Do you work with suppliers through letters? If so it’s time for a digital transformation. Online booking systems, SMS confirmations, payment gateways, interactive phone systems, online chat systems, the list is almost endless of digital transformation projects that your competitors have already implemented. Start by looking at how your customers interactive with your business, and think about the ways you could improve it. It may be as simple as setting up a Facebook page for your business so you can talk about new products or specials. It may be enough to update your Google Maps information with your opening hours, so people know all those late nights you put it.

Augmented Reality

Let’s put it out there, AR is cool. Feel like your in Star Trek or Minority Report with your Microsoft HoloLens. Enter the Matrix and demonstrate your Kung Fu skills. Ok this one is a little niche, there’s not a hugely viable or practical use case for a lot of AR technologies. But you have to admit it’s pretty amazing stuff. And surprisingly, devices like HoloLens don’t have an eye watering cost. They are not ridiculous. If I could justify it to the tax office or my wife, I’d already have one for the office.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on my Top 5 IT Trends. One thing I want to impress as a take away from everything I’ve discussed is, it’s not as hard as you might think. Technology can be overwhelming and it certainly is complex in many regards, but there are products and tools to help you improve your business. The changes you make don’t need to be big, in fact start small, and let things snowball from there. Any time you can dip your toe is great. It limits how badly things could go wrong, but let’s you start to get a sense of if that direction is right for you. It’s ok to try something and fail. It’s ok to try something and find you need to change your approach. Now more than ever IT is enabling you to dip your toe into different areas, test the waters and see if things work out.

Hopefully at the start of this year you are as excited as I am for the opportunities ahead. As always feel free to talk to us.