IT study 2024 – Trends, challenges and implications

By Marvin Maiwald, Peter Wienand and Christina Gröger

From its own front-line project experience but also from interviews with experts, Roland Berger once a year distills the main current trends across the world of information technology. This year’s report zooms in on six key strategic trends, asks what they mean for IT professionals and looks at how the latter are stepping up to deal with them.

While there are perhaps no major surprises on the list, environmentally friendly (green) IT has definitely graduated from nice-to-have status to an essential asset. Aside from its vital impact on mitigating climate change, companies are also at last waking up to the fact that ESG criteria in general and sustainability in particular constitute lucrative business opportunities.

Cyber-resilience too has become a must as a rising tide of cyber-crimes leaves an ever more alarming trail of financial and reputational damage in its wake. Meanwhile, increasingly ubiquitous cloud services are creating problems of their own – cost transparency being one of them, a lack of the necessary skills being another. With IT costs on the rise, more and more companies are looking to IT governance both to deliver on compliance and to rein in rampant budgets. Similarly, standardization has assumed a central role as large organizations strive to remain agile while constantly updating and integrating rapidly advancing technologies.

The disruptive force of AI

Topping the list for good reason, however, is the tsunami of disruption that artificial intelligence is already unleashing on the business world. And it is this massive topic to which this year’s report devotes a special deep dive.

In a series of in-depth interviews with top management and IT executives worldwide, more than two thirds of respondents rated their companies as “moderately prepared” to adopt Generative AI (GenAI) at best – and “completely unprepared” at worst.

Scratching below the surface, Roland Berger nevertheless explores what “AI readiness” really means even for those organizations that feel well-prepared.

Companies everywhere place great expectations on the potential of GenAI to transform many aspects of their business; and they acknowledge that virtually no aspect of modern business life will be left untouched by this transformative technology. The report therefore advises against simply throwing money at AI and hoping for a windfall. Rather, the discussion highlights the wisdom of a more nuanced approach: What exactly does your company want to achieve with AI? How mature is the technology itself? And do you have the right skills on board? These are only a few of the critical questions enshrined in Roland Berger’s “rAIse” framework , which helps companies arrive at a realistic AI readiness score from which they can move forward in implementing their individual strategy.

Organizational repercussions

The discussion moves on to the need to build suitable AI capabilities both within and (in many cases) outside the company, arguing for a clear vision, a granular data strategy and a defined operating model as the foundation without which concrete steps cannot be taken. Implementation issues are also addressed: Why do some solutions work for this company but not for that one? Again, the report recommends company-specific approaches to everything from AI governance to metrics that accurately measure the “success” delivered by AI applications in practice.

In closing, companies are urged to break with strategies that focus exclusively on cost and instead “embrace the value proposition mindset”. It is possible – and crucial – to engage in meticulous cost-benefit analyses if (Gen)AI is to genuinely have a lasting positive impact on organizations’ bottom line and ensure that the hoped-for benefits materialize in reality.

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