Let’s face it, these past few years we’ve been craving stability, clarity, and, dare I say it … the new normal. As we count down to 2023, I hear less about hopes for this future state and more about acceptance, preparing ourselves to weather new storms, and building resiliency. The pandemic, geopolitical dynamics, wars, and talent struggles have taught us a lot, and we’re bringing those learnings into the new year.
The job market and talent management have been top-of-mind this year, and this will not change in 2023. However, with ongoing economic uncertainty, teams will get creative with the talent pool they have and expand their typical practices by leaning on their partner ecosystems to supplement their talent strategy.
More businesses will be using managed service offerings to control selling, general, and administrative expenses (SG&A) and provide up or down-scaling flexibility, while simultaneously optimizing workplace productivity. For those skills and capabilities that companies elect to handle in-house, managers will lean more heavily on partners or vendors to train, upskill, and reskill workers to keep up with the pace of digitization.
Companies have now faced several black swan events over the past few years. Gone are the days when they could delay technology decisions until the storm blows over. In the coming year, the focus will be on investing in the resiliency of core infrastructure.
At the top of this strategy is data. No one disputes that data and, more importantly, the application of that data is king. Businesses will continue to lead with a digital-first strategy and move to integrated platforms, unifying their data to manage their full operations.
To support this, ERPs will continue to evolve into data-driven platforms that emphasize insights rather than just reporting. With the majority of the data that organizations need existing outside of their company, ERP vendors must assist companies in developing an actionable single source of truth. Complementing this, we will see continued migration to cloud-native architecture with microservices and APIs, due to scalability, security, and agility needs.