The 3 most crucial steps companies should take right now to jump on the hottest tech trends of 2020 and beat the competition

Deloitte

Bill Briggs, Deloitte's global chief technology officer

• Digital transformations affect more departments than just IT and successful overhauls require executives to engage with all levels of the enterprise.
• Often leadership needs to take a grassroots approach to building that support instead of relying on a CEO edict, according to Bill Briggs, chief technology officer at Deloitte.
• The professional services giant is expecting companies to rely more on virtual models in 2020 and make trust in technology a focus, among other top trends for the year.
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Digital transformations affect more than just the IT department.

Across the enterprise, teams are pivoting to be more agile and cross-functional. Projects that might historically take six months or longer to complete are now on deadlines as fast as one month.

And it's not just rank-and-file employees that are impacted. Chief financial officers and tech chiefs are working more closely than ever as companies look to get creative around funding the expensive digital overhauls that may take years to produce tangible financial benefits.

Even the CEO has to intimately involved - in some cases giving a top-down mandate to define the strategy. Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank, for example, famously said last year he was "building a technology company that does banking, instead of a bank that just uses technology."

"Tech is driving strategy. It's not the only force, but it's a major force," Bill Briggs, chief technology officer at Deloitte, told Business Insider.

All of that combined is what makes the overhauls so difficult. Despite the challenges, this year promises to be a pivotal chapter for many companies in their long-term tech modernization plan.

For 2020, Deloitte expects companies to increasingly rely on virtual models to test and scale new initiatives, according to the professional-services giant's latest tech trends report, which is an annual look into the most pivotal digital changes in the coming year. Organizations will also place a greater emphasis on trust in technology - a topic that is already at the forefront of the public discussion as more CEOs sound the alarm over the need to regulate AI.

Briggs, a 22-year veteran of the firm and executive editor of the report, outlined the steps companies should be taking right now to capitalize on the tech trends for 2020 and succeed in digital overhauls.

Get buy-in from the top of the organization to the bottom

Despite the power of a pronouncement like the one from Capital One's Fairbank, successful digital transformation can't be entirely dictated by a CEO edict. Similarly, support within just a few divisions or segments of the workforce can also make the initiative much more complicated.

"You can't relegate it to be one individual exec's or one department's job," Briggs said.

One struggle is convincing middle management - many who may have started at the beginning of, or even before, the digital movement - to adopt more advanced tools. "There is that institutional inertia," Briggs said. "It's going to require really different behaviors."

Companies are taking various approaches to overcome that hurdle. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, and others are building internal training programs to educate employees on AI and other new digital applications.

The goal is for those individuals to act as somewhat of a "tech evangelist" within their respective teams to encourage others to also undergo the training and adopt the tools.

A CEO mandate is great, but real change often has to come from within

For many companies, a mandate from the CEO is unlikely to be forceful enough to change many of the barriers to digital overhauls.

If the organization has a coherent strategy in place, then an executive edict can work, according to Briggs. But often companies pursuing modernization efforts are managing disparate end-goals between the various business segments - like HR and supply chain operations.

Instead, Briggs says companies should take a more grassroots approach and encourage teams across the enterprise to pursue their own projects.

"You've got these leaders with an evolved perspective of what tomorrow looks like, and they start creating these initiatives and they add up to real change," he said. "And in that change, it's not just delivering new products and services, but it's changing the way that you think about harnessing technology."

But even with the approach of smaller efforts, those projects must be guided by a common mission. "You can't end up with random acts of digital that are just interesting individually, but don't add up to anything," Briggs said.

As more of the smaller initiatives cross the finish line, the executive team can use the results to help inform an enterprise-wide strategy that can then be backed up by a CEO mandate.

Empower the rank-and-file to serve as inspiration for innovation

Faced with, among other things, the potential that top talent will leave to pursue their own ambitions, companies are increasingly trying to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit of the workforce.

Those efforts are also critical to successful digital overhauls. While leadership can determine ultimately what investments to make, many times it's the individuals in the store or in the factory who are actually using the applications and can provide feedback on how to improve them.

Walmart, for example, tests out its new AI-powered tools on store associates before rolling the tech out more broadly across its locations.

Taking these three steps can prepare organizations to capitalize on the biggest tech trends of 2020 and ensure their digital overhauls start - and continue - on strong footing.

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