Top 3 IT trends impacting business success in 2023

The evolution of the digital workplace has necessitated IT teams and leadership worldwide to adapt quickly to meet the growing demands of their increasingly-online workforce. Not only will spending on digital technologies increase – IT spending worldwide will grow 5.1% in 2023. 

Companies are looking to their IT departments to further enable their workforce to succeed, drive new business, and stay agile. These new opportunities, however, also come with several looming trends for IT leadership to keep in mind before gearing up to tackle 2023. 

The SaaS explosion 

SaaS sprawl isn’t a surprise for anyone – how increasingly prolific the problem is set to become, however, certainly will be. The average number of apps deployed has steadily risen across companies and industries with no end in sight, culminating in a combined growth of 22% over the past four years. The phenomenon is particularly pronounced for enterprise organizations, which deploy an average of 175 apps and counting. 

As the number of tools teams use continue to pile on, it can become a hassle to integrate and maintain systems to ensure that everything's working effectively. The sheer number of tools can cause crippling productivity loss, as training employees to use new systems and software effectively, as well as operate in line with compliance guidelines, can take time. Proliferation of files and information will also lead to increased difficulties when it comes to storing, indexing, and protecting data. 

IT needs to look for ways to speed up the onboarding process through better knowledge accessibility and discovery, as well as provide a single, searchable source of truth that enables teams to scale and onboard effectively as the volume of tools they use continues to grow. 

AI augmented intelligence 

There’s too much to do and learn – but that doesn’t mean we have to slow down. The AI revolution is here, and the tools we use every day should be capable of learning with us and continuously improving to provide us with better assistance. Those who learn how to harness and integrate powerful AI tools into day-to-day workflows will discover immense advantages when it comes to worker efficiency and productivity. Those who shy away, may get left in the dust wasting precious employee time and resources on tedious knowledge discovery, indexing, and administrative work better spent elsewhere. 

The key to really getting ahead of the curve is integrating powerful AI solutions that are capable of highly personalized, pinpoint assistance that predicts and provides for user needs without being told or manually adjusted. Not every worker and department in an organization will work in the same way – AI needs to be adaptable and personalized, fitting each user appropriately to help them do their best work. 

Lean and mean

Do more with less – many organizations are sticking to this creed, and IT has the opportunity to help deliver. One way is by better understanding which tools are worth keeping or consolidating. While SaaS tools can potentially provide immense benefits by saving time and effort, knowing which to keep, or which tools can be used to consolidate multiple functionalities, is essential to saving organizations considerable costs and resources in the coming year. 

Another consideration is the preservation and indexing of valuable knowledge. Companies lose an astronomical volume of resources (a trillion!) dealing with turnover and onboarding new employees. Having a tool that preserves knowledge from departing employees and makes it easily discoverable can cut considerable costs when it comes to onboarding new hires and educating new subject matter experts. 

Set to drive

2023 is set to be a year with IT firmly seated at the helm. Regarding everything from vendor to internal enablement, process optimization, and resource management, IT has the opportunity to impact the scope of each business like never before. What it’ll boil down to is implementing the right set of tools capable of setting each and every employee up for success in the coming year. 

If you’re looking to take a bright first step into 2023, get a Glean demo today and see how a cost-effective, smarter search solution can help battle SaaS sprawl and harness AI to provide your teams with precisely what they need to succeed.