Good day everybody. I hope everyone is doing well. Kevin Baylor with Alliance IT here. Just going to take a couple of minutes and spot off some trends I think we’re going to see in technology coming up here in 2020.
So again, don’t hold me to it. Don’t necessarily sell squares around the office and banking on these results. But I think a couple of things we’re going to see are some reduction in transactional jobs. We already see it now. You’re seeing more self-service lines at Walmart. You’ve got the self-ordering kiosk at McDonald’s. A lot of these transactional jobs are going to shift over to automation.
It’s good and bad of course. We all know the pros and cons of that. From a technology standpoint, it’s great for the tech industry. Creating more tech jobs, hardware, software, support services, repair services in that tech industry.
I really think we’re going to see more and more of that spreading out throughout retail and even in manufacturing. We know that Amazon has a lot of automation in their warehouses and seeing that pushed down to some of the midsized manufacturing and warehousing type companies as well.
I think we’re going to see even more flatter organizations. We’re seeing a decline in a lot of the midlevel management instead of these three and four-level deep type organizations. We’re seeing more 2-D organizations essentially. A lot of the middle management roles are being shifted around again due to changes in business, changes in technology. But what we feel that does when it relates to technology is you’re putting more emphasis on reliable technology, reliable technology that’s going to be able to make decisions or provide data to the management that is there. So they can make sound accurate decisions that maybe they haven’t made before.
So again, we’re probably going to see that more in your midsized to enterprise markets. I don’t think that’s necessarily going to affect a small business. But we will wait and see. We will see what happens with that, whether flatter organizations really do take off.
We know 3-D printing is out there. We’re going to see more and more of 3-D printing. There’s a lot of different industries that are already talking about some plans that they have for increasing the ability, cost-effectiveness and usability in 3-D printing. So you’re going to see that from maybe your small manufacturing business to more of a larger enterprise distribution business or technology business. It’s just something that’s – you know, you can do it at home. You need a part – well, maybe you can just go print it at home. We will see how far that goes in the consumer market. But really looking forward to that push in your mid to enterprise market.
Mobile apps, we see them all over the place. We use them in our everyday lives. But we really feel that the service industry is probably going to be most affected next year with an increase in use in mobile apps. It kind of ties in a little bit with your reduction in transactional jobs and roles. But the service industry, whether it’s HVAC or plumbing or retail type service, mobile apps are going to become more and more mainstay. They’re going to become a key part of that business’s success.
What it looks like for every individual business, it’s kind of hard to say. But overall, we’ve seen mobile apps really taking off and helping the small to midsized service industry.
Anyways, just a few thoughts out there. I could be completely wrong. We may go back to the Dark Ages and use pen and paper next year. Who knows? But we will see.
Kevin Baylor, Alliance IT.
