What you need to know about technology in 2019

In today’s business environment, the impact of information technology is monumental. It may be worth investing in employee development, even among veteran staffers.

In fact, there is already a shortage of data science professionals, and experts forecast that demand will increase 30.7% in the decade preceding 2026. It’s becoming more popular for moms and older professionals to go back to school and learn new tech skills. No doubt, technology is not going away. The more technical skills we have, the more likely we can excel in business and in life.

Read on for a few more tips to help you prosper in 2019.

Tip: Update your social media strategy
Not all social media platforms last forever. Such is the case with Google+. If you relied on this retired service to drive business, you need to adjust your strategy.

While you can still access Google+, plans are in the works to shut it down completely in late 2019. This is understandable. It never really caught on. Still, some businesses made use of the site. If you are among those businesses, you need to change how you communicate with your clients or consumers.

If you plan to refocus your marketing efforts on Facebook, the social media giant has released a new resource to measure advertising campaigns.

You can also use other social media platforms, such as Instagram. There are several third-party options online that allow you to measure your social media marketing initiatives.

Tip: Take advantage of new Artificial Intelligence capabilities
There’s a growing amount of available satellite imagery. More importantly, the cost to access this data is dropping rapidly. At the same time, there’s a growing need for businesses to analyse image-based information. Resultantly, interest in technologies - such as facial recognition, image recognition and object detection - is on the rise, especially among businesses that specialise in fields such as security and fraud detection.

These firms will increasingly leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to evaluate unstructured data, such as images and video feeds. As a result, technology that’s designed to analyse movement using AI will expand this year. If your firm works with images, it will be well worth leveraging the technology to jump light years ahead of industry peers.

Tip: Optimise your content marketing and advertising
Content is still king, but you need to revise your strategy this year. In part, you’ll need to figure out what trends now affect your ideal consumers. This is always changing. Accordingly, you’ll need to adjust your content marketing and advertising strategies.

As an example, the increasing use of smart voice assistants is changing the way that people interact with content and each other. In effect, you’ll have to adjust your marketing strategy to align with new consumer habits.

Tip: Make use of unstructured data
So far, most companies have focused on using historical data to find opportunities, and this was effective. Now, however, enterprise leaders need a snapshot of historical data combined with forecasts of potential future outcomes.

This enhanced analytic capability allows decision-makers to better identify potential upcoming threats and opportunities. Experts suggest that the top competitive firms of 2019 will focus on this kind of insight, where enterprise leaders make decisions based on past performance and forecast outcomes.

Only 19% of high school girls participate in advanced placement computer classes compared to 81-percent of boys. A career in data science is a great way for women and minorities to reduce or even eliminate income and professional disparities.

Increasingly, business leaders will leverage technology to make decisions. Advanced data analysis isn’t as simple as plugging information into a program and waiting for it to spit out results. Making use of this kind of advanced analysis requires constant intervention by skilled experts. As a result, the demand for specialists who work with advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence will rise, presenting an excellent opportunity for underrepresented populations in the field.

With the evolution of artificial intelligence and the expanding universe of data generated by the growing IoT, the point where enterprises gather information will get increasing the closer to the source.

Data science experts refer to this as 'the edge'. In fact, it will be the next frontier in AI. Enterprise leaders will no longer rely solely on data centres as information sources.

As this occurs, data analysts will find a challenge in ensuring that information is secure, uncorrupted and valid. Furthermore, as business needs evolve, enterprise leaders will need talented data scientists to develop new algorithms and train existing AI technology to work with structured and unstructured information.

Looking forward, this trend will continue. As the use of advanced analysis technology evolves, so will the data science profession.