Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

With the announcement of Ventana Research’s 2022 Market Agenda, our expertise in Digital Business continues to advance the market need for effective investments into technology, and I will outline here the key areas of focus to provide insights to organizations that can increase their organizational resilience and workforce readiness. We are proud to provide expertise on ensuring technological effectiveness through our market research and experience in providing guidance on trends and best practices.

The necessity of business continuity came to a reality with the pandemic in early 2020, with the requirement to avoid the risk of interruption to the fundamentals of an organization. I outlined this challenge in my perspective, “The Business Continuity Imperative: The Workforce Experience and Human Capital Management in 2020 and Beyond.” Ensuring that software in cloud computing environments is continuously available should be a business continuity priority for your organization. In fact, your own chief information, risk and operations officers should ensure your organization has the level of reliability that you expect and pay for from your software as a service provider. And does your provider perform the level of investment and protection that you would expect to protect your organization? Do you ensure the level of preparation in business continuity has been done, and do you have a disaster recovery program you can institute in a moment’s notice? Can you operate your business if critical software is not available for more than a day, week, month or longer? Unfortunately, our assertion is that by 2025, after decades of digital transformation efforts, two-thirds of organizations will not resource business continuity as an investment priority to reduce operational risk in black swan events.

The necessity of learning is essential for every organization to realize the full potential of the workforce. But many organizations treat learning like training or academic instruction to ensure policy or compliance to a minimum level of work performance, instead of continuing career education and improving skills in the operational workflow. The context for where and how workers work is critical to ensure that on-the-job learning is possible. While traditional learning management systems (LMS) have advanced the authoring and curriculum for formalized training in a digital learning environment, the need to adapt learning to the operational requirements is essential for every organization. This context provides the opportunity for continuous skills development, which is essential to building organizational readiness and workforce resilience critical for everyday operations and business continuity. We assert that by 2024, learning management systems and learning experience platforms with embedded skill and job ontologies that recommend optimal learning paths will guide one-half of organizations to elevate employee engagement, retention and productivity.

Ventana Research has announced its market agenda for 2022, continuing the tradition of reliability in our efforts to educate and guide the technology market. Our assessments are backed by our expertise and independence, as we do not share our market agenda or our research – including analyst and market perspectives or our Value Index – with any external party until it is published. We review and refine our market agenda throughout the year to ensure we offer the expertise and insights organizations rely on to better assess and navigate the direction of the technology industry.