Top Strategic Predictions for 2022 and Beyond

The world left behind another tiring year and welcomed a fresh one. After the extraordinary epidemic that started in 2020, we also experienced changes in 2021. In this context, expectations for 2022 gain great importance. Towards the end of each year, Gartner publishes its predictions on the following year’s top technology trends. As for the rest of the business world, we were waiting to get our hands on this report, and here are the top five trends that we believe will greatly impact our technology decisions next year. Happy 2022!

Customers devaluing personal data for privacy

By 2024, 40% of consumers will trick behavior tracking metrics to intentionally devalue the personal data collected about them, making it difficult to monetize employing behavior tracking avoidance technology using VPN, browsers, plug-ins, operating systems and devices.

Customers will be most likely entering false personal information that isn’t useful for companies, Viewing, liking, clicking, linking or even purchasing items that they aren’t interested in, in order to create an incorrect persona for marketing or recommendation algorithms and in order to artificially inflate demand, increase visibility or drive up pricing. They will withhold personal information or permission to track behavior from companies that want to.

Stop relying on 3rd-party data tracking and sharing, and target gathering 1st-party data from customers with trust. Collect less data but more quality data and send regular updates on what you’ve gathered to your customers. By 2025, synthetic data will reduce personal customer data collection, avoiding 70% of privacy violation sanctions. Therefore, include synthetic data (data generated using AI techniques) in your data and analytics strategy.

Neuromining: The new way to understand customers

It is so important To imply behavioral intelligence and related technology to analyze, understand and influence human behavior at scale. Advances in neuroscience and technologies to identify and direct activity inside the brain will add further precision in influencing attitudes, actions and behavior, and launch further waves of neuromining capabilities. Develop in-house expertise on understanding and mining behavioral data to improve customer and employee outcomes.

Create a behavioral insights team to focus deliberate and ongoing attention on questioning assumptions and challenging current approaches. To better understand customer goals, desires and motivations, deep dive into social Media Analytics, the increasing sophistication of analytics and AI applied to behavioral data.

Beyond marketing and customer experience, neuromining will expand into scalable leadership and performance coaching, every aspect of decision making, and employee and citizen wellbeing.

Concept of Composability: Adapt or die

By 2024, 80% of CIOs list modular business redesign as a top five reason for accelerated business performance. This is a design approach that enables systems — IT systems, organizations, products, etc. — to adapt quickly to changes while staying resilient. At the heart of composability is modularity. Basic elements are partitioned into a system of building blocks that can easily be configured into a solution.

3 key properties are Autonomy — Building blocks that can be easily changed, orchestration — Building blocks that agree on their method of interaction and discovery — Building blocks that are identified, monitored and managed. By 2024, 80% of CIOs surveyed will list modular business redesign, through composability, as a top five reason for accelerated business performance.

Start small by applying the principles of composability as you update or add any automated business capabilities. Shift the mindset to “change is the means to new value” by evangelizing to business leaders the benefits of modularity. Minimize operational interdependencies that inhibit change. Measure value via business capability reuse, the time to deliver a change, cost and ease of change, and reductions of dedicated resources.

Breaking up with poor-fit customers

Poor-fit customers consume budget, resources and employee time that could go to good-fit customers. Managing a bad relationship is emotionally draining, leading to worse well-being or even increased attrition among customer service representatives and sellers. While investments in poor-fit customers may boost revenue in the short run, long-term investments compromise profitability in the long run.

By 2025, 75% of companies will “break up” with poor-fit customers as the cost of retaining them eclipses good-fit customer acquisition costs. Companies are better at identifying when the breakup needs to happen, as they have more insight into whether the current partnership is mutually beneficial or has the chance of becoming beneficial. Many customers won’t take offense to it, as they dislike when organizations continue to push poor-fit products/services.

By proactively breaking up with customers, companies can plan for losing this customer — both evaluating whether they can afford this loss and making contingency plans to ensure they can hit their financial targets after the breakup. Through this, the company can preserve goodwill and protect the chance of a future relationship by ending things nicely

Teams without bosses

The pandemic period has embedded agility inside business operations. And it will stay postpandemic. Most organizations are looking into making most of the changes — the shift to remote and hybrid models — permanent instead of going back to “what it used to be.” Teams without bosses are on the rise, as more emphasis is placed on career guidance and support than on tactical ordergiving and taking.

By 2024, 30% of corporate teams will be without a boss due to the self-directed and hybrid nature of work. Management — the art of getting things done through people — still needs to happen. But the traditional manager profile might be dead. Leverage Agile, Scrum and related methodologies in their essence. Their use over time has built a significant library of knowledge and expertise around deployment of teams without a boss.

Pay attention to manager redeployment activities. Managers possess valuable skills that can maximize the performance of teams in other roles than the boss. You still need a sound business strategy, clear goals and individual engagement to power teams without a boss.