The start of a new year is always exciting. It gives you a chance to think big, make some changes and find ways to make this year even better than the last. We talked to several Sparq technology leaders from across our practice areas to learn what they’re excited about for 2022 and how that’ll affect technology professionals and their clients.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the free space in buzzword bingo for the past few years. However, in 2022, I’m getting excited about Decision Intelligence (DI), which is a range of decision-making methods to design, model, align, execute and track decision models and processes. It’s where the rubber meets the road. Now that we’re getting better and better with creating AI predictive models, we’re finally able to do something with it. Truly leveraging AI and Machine Learning to guide the decisions of business leaders and decision-makers will be industry-changing. What industry? All of them.”
–Chris Simmons, Principal & Delivery Executive
“As we head into a new year, I’m excited about the momentum and adoption of product discovery practices. Focusing on your customers/end users to create meaningful experiences and connections is more important than ever in the fast-paced, digital world we’re living in. When product and engineering organizations can implement discovery practices consistently and bring the user’s needs to the forefront when developing digital products, businesses will see a positive impact to their bottom line. My prediction is we will see more emphasis and importance placed on discovery practices, potentially as a specialized skill set, and the need for product managers and leaders to rely on discovery findings to make the right decisions for product development.”
-Beth Jagodinsky, Director of Product Management
“I’m excited to see what happens with quantum computing. Whereas conventional computers work with “bits” of data at an atomic level, quantum computers work at a subatomic level dealing with quantum bits, so these processors will be a million or more times faster than conventional processors. Currently, the largest quantum computers have only dozens of qubits. However, IBM is on track to release a 1,121-qubit computer by 2023, which is set to really move this science forward and take it beyond academia, where most quantum work has traditionally taken place. The types of problems these computers can solve can advance healthcare, finance, electronic products and so much more.”
–David Sullivan, Principal Consultant
“I’m looking forward to introducing more clients to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which is a process where you can manage data centers through machine-readable definition files instead of physical hardware. One of the biggest benefits I see with IaC is minimizing the risk of human error. I was recently in a situation where an employee of a client deleted a database because they deployed it in the console instead of IaC. Had this person used IaC, the likelihood of them deleting something erroneously would have been minimized since it would have been more obvious that this database was part of a larger stack. It also would have had documentation, allowing them to ask about it before any action was taken, in addition to other important safeguards. Humans are going to make mistakes, but utilizing IaC can help you get back to where you were quickly.”
–Jeff Pabian, Principal Consultant
“This year, I’m excited about the continued acceleration of digital transformation. The need for both the most modern and the most traditional businesses to continue their evolution in providing value to their customers digitally will continue to accelerate. We’re helping our clients do so in many creative ways. This need coupled with our new Product Strategy & Design offering has me very excited about 2022.”
–Scott Monnig, Chief Client Officer
“In 2022, I’m looking forward to a continued shift toward a product-oriented focus in software development and an improved vision of how software development teams measure success. Standard measurements of success in software development are fairly well understood at this point, but as an industry, I don’t think we do nearly as good of a job at completing the feedback loop and measuring if our users actually like the things we’ve built. Product-oriented measurements of success are often disjointed from software development measurements of success leading to competing priorities amongst business units. My hope is that we will see a clearer connection between the iteration and course correction that Agile does so well and direct feedback from end users. I’m excited to see what an improved awareness of how we measure success in relation to our end users does for the way development teams organize and prioritize their work.”
–John Moore, Principal Consultant
“I’m looking forward to more of our Quality Assurance Analysts adopting the role of quality coach or advisor in development teams. As companies are striving to adopt a shift-left testing approach, quality coaches can advise teams on how to own quality throughout the development process. Quality coaches can help identify project risks early and mitigate those risks. By creating a quality strategy, a quality coach helps teams deliver products quickly with a quality-first approach.”
–Jeanne Schmidt, Senior Principal Consultant
“3D and AR (Augmented Reality) will continue to be hot topics in 2022 – and finally moving much closer to being mainstream. With Facebook rebranding as Meta, it’s put an emphasis on the idea of a “metaverse.” That combined with the steady rumors of Apple putting out a VR/AR hybrid product means that we’re going to be spending a lot of time looking at how things manifest in a 3D space. Meta’s Oculus has also made solid quality VR accessible at a relatively low price point, and it just consistently gets better and better – which means even independent developers and hobbyists have access to the technology, allowing for more experimentation in that space as well. 3D and AR put an emphasis on exploration and interaction design – using movement and depth to help guide the user – and I’m looking forward to seeing how these trends translate to the more easily accessible, 2D, digital space.”
–Joe Dallacqua, Principal Consultant
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