Andras Szakal, chief technology officer at The Open Group, has shared his thoughts on recent “megatrends” in global work life and technology and what he foresees as their impacts on one another.
In an article for the Global Banking & Finance Review, Szakal traces the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on attitudes toward the workplace as well as identifies the digital transformations needed to keep pace with such evolutions.
Szakal notes that when necessary changes occurred because of the pandemic, they were in line with shifts that were already happening in terms of technological and medical innovations.
“Even just five years ago many of the strategies we used to mitigate [the pandemic’s] damage – from remote working to rapid vaccine and therapeutics development – would not have been possible in the same way,” Szakal writes.
The executive also discusses how mass-career-changes – which he dubs “the great resignation” – from in-person, hospitality-based jobs to digitally rooted ones will (and perhaps have already begun to) usher in an implementation of artificial intelligence and automated technologies in place of these vacating workers.
Szakal attributes this to data that shows that it is “the nature of the work, and not just their ability to get a job, as their main motivating factor” to switch career paths.
In addition to AI, he cites quantum computing and augmented reality as other technologies that are evolving at an ideal rate to meet the ever-growing and mutating needs of humans.
In the end, Szakal turns to technology architecture as a way to allow separate aspects of society that have grown increasingly codependent to cross-pollinate and communicate effectively.
“Without a holistic architecture to structure that communication, the end result will be chaos,” Szakal writes, continuing, “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.”
He also says he believes a software by his company the Open Group called the TOGAF Standard offers a winning platform for exercising a functional digital architecture.