Accenture Unveils Disruptive Trends In 2017

ACCENTURE has unveiled the most significant emergent digital trends expected to disrupt organisations and society in 2017.

According to the Fjord Trends 2017 released by Accenture, 2016 has taught that digital technologies and hyper-connectivity are bringing user-led innovation to market faster than ever.

The report, the tenth and most provocative annual report from Accenture disclosed that successful organisations today are those that best adapt and respond to unceasing change.

The report showed that three meta themes emerged, challenging long-held norms and assumptions noting that the rise of the autonomous vehicle, smart homes and digital assistants is creating new ecosystems that threaten the smartphone’s dominance as the main command center of our lives.

The Accenture study added that storytelling has taken new shape through the popularity of live stories and raw, personal content as a refashioned form of broadcast stressing that the rise of social experience will soon be a consideration for any organization wanting to cut through in a post-truth world.

While commenting on the report, Chief Client Officer, Fjord, Mark Curtis, said: “The year is about making us smarter humans and fostering human potential by creating helpful, meaningful services across an expanded array of digitized environments.”

He added: “Interfaces are becoming faster, smaller and automated, and organizations will need to adapt to the kind of supercharged, responsive and immersive environments now possible. Our tenth annual Trends report aims to provoke, inform and inspire but, above all, to provide actionable insights into designing for the rapidly evolving world of experience.”

Trends 2017 examines eight digital trends expected to shape the next generation of experiences, which include re-wiring for innovation, organisations will need to completely re-wire to inspire creative thinking and become more people-centric.

The report said that organisations will do that by up scaling the principles and practices of innovation to effect organisation-wide transformation adding that “with a polarized brand landscape, brands sitting in the squeezed middle will need to change their strategies and either lean towards a clear purpose or advocate a ‘we can do anything’ voice.”

Another trend the report noted was that as Mixed Reality moves towards the mainstream, organisations will turn away from single, siloed enhanced reality experiences to focus instead on harnessing and combining all types of reality-both enhanced and real.

Country Managing Director, Accenture Nigeria, Niyi Yusuf, said,  “We are witnessing an unprecedented era of innovation, placing the need for companies to rewire in order to succeed,” adding “Organisations across every sector are learning to harness digital to become more customer-centric. It is through this lens that organisations need to rethink their purpose and what they call a service in order to convert change into opportunities.”

Trends 2017 draws upon the collective thinking of Fjord’s 800+ designers and developers around the world based on first-hand observations, third-party research and client work.