In this the first episode of The CIO Show for this year, we talk to two leading analysts and one of last year’s top performers in the CIO50 about what they expect to see on the digital horizon for 2021, as well as musing on some of the dud predictions from 2019.

Rob Hillard, Deloitte Asia Pacific chief transformation officer expects to see more examples of consumer tech infiltrating the enterprise, in the form of more user-friendly UIs and simpler cloud platforms and applications, along with a deeper understanding and appreciation of the cloud’s potential to help unify and synchronise supply chains in massive industries like automotive.

In fact, Hillard believes one of the reason’s predictions Tesla would fail last year was arguably the biggest ‘dud’, was the company’s ability to fully harness the cloud for vastly greater efficiencies and scale.

Kudzai Kanhutu, deputy chief medical information officer and infectious diseases doctor with The Royal Melbourne Hospital thinks 2021 will be defined by deeper thought and consideration of digital projects, as organisations – especially in healthcare – recover from the madness and trauma of 2020. She hopes the experience might inspire better strategies for improving performance and uptake of the beleaguered My Health Record but isn’t holding her breath.  

Tim Sheedy, principal advisor with analyst firm Ecosystm predicts vendors will talk less about ‘AI’, as the feeling grows that if it’s not already built into your stack you shouldn’t be talking at all. And he predicts this year we’ll see not only growing acceptance and deployment of hybrid-cloud models, but also better tools to manage them. Likewise, for multi-cloud.