Everyone’s got an opinion about where business will lead, trend, and ultimately thrive in the years to come, and those opinions center around technology. We’re about to embark on the 2nd half of this decade, and 2035 is strangely close, so here are my opinions on what technical skills business leaders need to emphasize – and why – to succeed through the next 10 years of innovation.
Data Literacy
Data literacy (and stewardship) should be taught as early as elementary or middle school and be centered on building knowledge from data and ethical use of both. Why? Data usage operates everything.
Consider three fundamental components of data literacy for all that leaders need to ensure within their workforce, especially when considering data’s transformation into information, knowledge, and wisdom:
- The importance of data to the work roles of now and the future
- Uses and limitations of raw data
- Structures of data and how they convey meaning
Organisations will likely need to provide training to add skills for workers who are in positions that are not data centric. In 2035, the people born in the early 1970s will be nearing or at US retirement age. The previous generation has largely vacated the workforce, leaving the operations managed and conducted by digital-native workers.
The time to act toward basic data literacy in all industries is now. The workforce is primed for it – the need to understand how these devices that we make and use actually operate and how to manage their underlying data. This is the operational, non-technical key to valuing – and protecting – future privacy, also.
Cybersecurity Governance
Governance is the key to managing risk and compliance. NIST CSF 2.0 added governance as that overarching ingredient that enables the key cybersecurity functions of identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover as they relate to assets and attacks against those assets. It’s governance that enables key performance indicators (KPIs) and the business equivalent of clean rooms.
Governance – the word – invokes ideas of centralization, of stifling creativity and even staid operations. Nevertheless, governance is the key to effect cybersecurity, and cybersecurity improvements are integral to the success of the next few decades.
Proper and intentional governance enables measurable and directional improvement when combined with best practices, industry risks and opportunities, and those ever-present KPIs. Consider decisions made from business analysis and the tracking of those decisions to inform strategy and drive outcomes. It almost feels like I’m talking about general business and not cybersecurity – but cybersecurity concerns are both business and risk related.
Governance incorporates compliance but moves beyond it to incorporate those business objectives and how to mitigate risk without losing competitive advantage. It makes these things measurable and measured.
AI Expertise
AI LLMs will be rebranded to help distinguish between them and AI targeted machine learning and datasets, and this shift in terminology is necessary to help train the AI workers of the future. I expect massive gains in both areas; there’s a quote out there that AI is as bad today as it’ll ever be, and that’s true each day.
Focal points for the next decade are the proper application of AI to the right problems. The goal is for people to tackle stickier and more persistent, complex problems while allocating the repeatable and mundane to the machines.
In the next 10 years we need to define and build the right guardrails and double and triple check them. Verify and then trust to build public trust. These will include clear measures of accuracy and proof of lack of bias, both of which require time and clear success. While we know both are definitely issues in 2024, they must diminish significantly in the coming year or two to keep on path for proven success. Back to governance, yes?
Continued Pulse on Emerging Technologies
A quick word about emerging technologies now.
Quantum computing must always be mentioned as both a risk and an opportunity regarding the future. Many of society’s trickier problems will benefit from quantum approaches and probabilistic solutions even as quantum computing breaks current solutions, such as many algorithms in use today for cryptography.
Consider also advancements in IoT devices (and hopefully their security) and the likelihood that more and more of them will be embedded in (or attached to) our bodies, making them medical technology. We will continue to seek to augment human possibilities and decrease human deficiencies and disease and use technology and data to make this happen.
Ethical discussion will thus also continue, especially in emerging technological advances in this medical realm. Will former economic and ethical models no longer apply as ethical norms change in pursuit of these goals? Likely.
Conclusion
In 2035, the digital native generations will fully control business reins. These digital enabled and digital native workers need decision-making frameworks that incorporate the wisdom of the workers who came before. Said workers will be retiring people – the leaders who remember the people and process orientation sans the technology marvels to which we’ve become accustomed.
Therefore, the people skills of 2035 and beyond will require the knowledge of past and aging generations. This is the know-how of the please, thank-you, follow-up, and relationship building that isn’t prompted by calendar reminders but instead by the need to connect in a human manner, and this lens needs to be applied to the proper management and use of data, too.
While enhanced digital work enables the transformation, it’s the people who sustain it. Technology is the platform upon which the processes are and will be (further) built. Competitive advantage will be won by innovation in people and process integration atop and within that technology.
The greatest skill for the future is expanded technology, people, and business integration, while preserving ethical discussion and including cybersecurity. This combination defines leadership of the future. Remember governance.
In this next decade we need to build leaders who will train future leaders ready to tackle these concerns and remember that they are concerns.
