By Andras R. Szakal, CTO, The Open Group

The Open Group passed its 25th birthday last year, and in that time, it has played a significant role in building and supporting the weave of technology which we now move through on a daily basis. From standardizing UNIX to setting out the world’s most widely-used Enterprise Architecture framework, this vendor-neutral technology consortium is now so fundamental that it feels something like an oak tree: sturdy, reliable, part of the landscape.

Just like an oak tree, though, The Open Group has achieved its longevity not by resisting change, but by continuing to grow in new directions. A quarter of a century is a long time – especially considering that technology and society develop and progress as rapidly as they do today – and The Open Group has both sparked and adapted to many business and technology trends in that time.

Today, there is a host of trends on the horizon which won’t just alter certain sectors or ways of going to market, but shift the operation of large parts of the economy en masse. Business imperatives like supply chain transformation and climate action are being joined by emerging technologies like quantum computing and robotics to give us a daunting set of megatrends to navigate in the coming years.

Understanding megatrends

The potential energy bound up in these megatrends is made particularly potent, of course, by the fact that we are now emerging from perhaps the most significant and wide-ranging global disruption in living memory. More than enough has been written about the impacts of the pandemic, but it still bears mentioning that even just five years ago many of the strategies we used to mitigate its damage – from remote working to rapid vaccine and therapeutics development – would not have been possible in the same way.

In that disruption, many assumptions have been shed and many patterns have been changed, perhaps permanently. Looking closely at workforce changes, for example, we find that the ‘great resignation’ of people changing careers during the pandemic represents not just directionless churn, but a clear move from jobs centered on more simplistic human interaction, like hospitality, to areas seeking to digitally transform. Moreover, these career-changers often cite the nature of the work, and not just their ability to get a job, as their main motivating factor.

This trend itself has been empowered by the fact that so much more work can now, following the forcing effect of the pandemic, be performed remotely. Thanks to a suite of technologies which businesses have implemented over the last decade, skills can often be matched to business needs without regard to geography. Indeed, many businesses are now rethinking what kinds of labor truly need to be done by people who live locally.

There are a few different things we could call megatrends at play in the story: the ongoing evolution of SaaS to offer new, more powerful services; working from home maturing from a stop-gap into a permanent strategy; and, as career preferences change, the opportunity for robotics and automation to fill gaps in the human workforce. Which is to say, this very recent example shows how business and technology megatrends should be seen as distinct from one another.

Navigating the megatrend

We could tell a similar story about how quantum computing will interact with security and privacy in a world where consumers are growing increasingly wary of how their data is used. Or about how augmented reality will further erode geographic barriers in areas like online learning. Or about how AI is being applied to both measure and reduce emissions in the race to respond to climate change.

The question is one of how we should prepare to navigate trends which will, in real ways, affect the human condition – especially given the complex level of interdependence between them.

The answer, I think, comes back to technology architecture. The fact that they are cross-sector in nature means that these megatrends will draw areas of life into contact with each other which never previously needed to share information and processes. In this cycle of business needs and technology shifts sparking one another across large parts of the economy, we will find that systems as distinct as healthcare, supply chain logistics, and AI development will suddenly need to be able to communicate effectively and reliably.

Without a holistic architecture to structure that communication, the end result will be chaos; even now, many businesses are having to ameliorate technical debt which built up in responding to the pandemic with suboptimal overnight changes to working processes.

Too often, when we speak of technology architecture, we think purely in terms of IT, of how systems can be provisioned and how data can be appropriately piped to them. In order to grow and adapt through the next waves of change, which blur any distinction between technological and business pressure, that kind of thinking will need to be elevated to encompass a bigger, clearer picture where continuous digital transformation is core to the strategy

At The Open Group we’re doing that by constantly evolving our long-standing products, such as the TOGAF® Standard, a standard of The Open Group, to offer clearer methods for applying Enterprise Architecture principles to the digital, Agile enterprise. We’re also doing it by building out new solutions, such as The Open Group Open Footprint™ Forum, which is poised to standardize how enterprise environmental data is measured and shared.

It’s really no exaggeration to say that these anticipated megatrends will significantly affect the human condition. In order to make their effect as positive as possible, we need to prepare for them now or risk being buffeted by unpredictable disruptive forces.