I am feeling blacker than Black Friday this year – must be the stormy weather and dark mornings…
• We will begin to see from results whether large SIAM and Towers multi-vendor deals can satisfy original business cases and genuinely deliver the benefits of ‘best of breed’, collaboration and flexibility for the additional contractual complexity.
• Organisations will start to adopt wide-scale but ‘light’ RPA (Robotic Process Automation) (as opposed to complex AI) which will cause some disruption to traditional sourcing models and employment practices.
• The Internet of Things will continue to evolve so as increasingly to remove humans from the equation through behind the scenes interaction of machines.
• Cyber-attacks of a scale and sophistication not yet seen will hit corporate, government and third sectors with at least one blue-chip CEO or ministerial level resignation – also a focus on readying Rio physical infrastructure for the 2016 Summer Olympics will risk a major ‘drop of the ball’ (forgive the sporting puns) on IT infrastructure and security.
• Mass proliferation of drones will lead to some more high profile accidents and privacy violations and pressure will grow to reinforce drone regulation and effectively enforce the rules we already have.
• Just as companies are picking up the pieces from the demise of Safe Harbor, they will now have to turn their attention more fully to the new EU Data Protection Regulation which will finally arrive in 2016 after four years of discussion (but will have to wait another 12 to 24 months for full enforcement).
• As retailers’ websites and logistics operations struggle to cope with the spike in demand, Black Friday Weekend will become Black Friday Month next year…
As I say, a bit pessimistic this year but I’ll bounce back for 2017!’
{b}Callum Sinclair is a Partner at DLA Piper{/b}
