Interesting technology trends in 2021 and how you should be positioned

Some interesting technologies today include: Digital Workplace, Online Learning, Telehealth and AI-generated content. We will be looking at what they are and how we should be positioning to improve our chances of maximizing same for our individual and national profit.

Digital Workspace: The future of work is Digital and our posture today should be that of reaching for more productive, process efficient and meaningful engagements through a deliberate leverage on innovative workplace technologies.

Creating digital workplaces offer organizations the ability to meet up with new challenges in the most unpredictable business scenarios. Apart from business process efficiency, digital workplaces give you better collaboration options, flexibility, and business dexterity while you are able to achieve measurable results.

For better clarity, digital workplace is a cloud-based work-tailored platform that allows businesses move their work online. Such platforms accommodate important applications, tools, team collaboration features and access to data that employees require to perform their work in a secure virtual interface, accessible from anywhere, anytime and from any device. For short, everyday work is seamlessly handled via connectivity to a digital device.

Some advantages of the Digital Workspace are that it allows more flexibility while giving your employees better user experience, enables better costs optimization, lets you continue to offer better services and business processes, gives your customers better and easier-to-measure experience, and a whole new improvement option in the leadership decision-making of the organization.

Companies can hire consultants to create from scratch a suitable work environment to replace their physical workplace in its entirety leveraging on current technologies with meetings and collaborations happening online realtime. This is the future of what we will be engaging as work and the internet has come to level the business playing field.

Individuals and organizations should realize that employment can be sought and got from anywhere today. Like a couple of my friends now work remotely with US and Canadian organizations from the comfort of their homes in Nigeria. We must begin to engage with these tools to redefine how we work and what work means to us more than just zoom meetings.

Online learning: Imagine a barrier-less school with over 24 million students, 35,000 instructors, and over 80,000 courses offered to students across the globe. Welcome to the world of virtual learning. The covid-19 pandemic has necessitated our schools to start thinking of ways to take the entire learning interactions to the web.

Some of these platforms out of Nigeria include: National Open University, Edufirst, AfriLearn and uLesson, while others are Udemy, Shaw Academy, Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning; Treehouse and Coursera. A poor WAEC and JAMB result notwithstanding, the interesting part of it is that the courses are offered to everyone and facilitated by some of the best subject-matter experts and a good number of them offer certificates of completion with several free courses possible. Self-paced learning is also very possible with more emphasis on what you are able to do with the new skill. This is not to leave out the almost unlimited possibilities with leaning through various Youtube video channels.

Individuals, Organizations (non-profit and for profit alike) and government should already be collaborating to create learning centers with easy accessibility to the public within each local community development area. Such centers will offer opportunities to people to develop their skillset in astounding ways. Basic computers, internet and a source of power like a typical cybercafe is all that is required for such centers.

Another growing technology trend is Telehealth, which is fast gaining visibility with the spread of covid-19. It is the use of digital information and communication technologies, such as tablets, mobile devices and personal computers to access and manage health care related services without physical contact. Take for an instance the ways Telehealth could help a diabetic patient. They could use a mobile device to send food logs, receive medications, use apps to check blood sugar levels for review by some nurse that responds remotely. One other ways could be to watch a YouTube video on carbohydrate counting, even download an app for same to your phone. An estimate of required amount of insulin could  also be done based on your diet and exercise levels. Never forget that you can place an order for testing supplies and medications via web. These are just a few things among several others that Telehealth brings to light and it all rests on what you know. The primary aim of Telehealth, also known as electronic health or mobile health, are: To bring quality health care to people who live in remote and rural communities; Offer healthcare services in more convenient ways to people with limited or no mobility or transport; Provide timely access to medical specialists across different continents; and to improve the communication and organization process of quality care among members of a health care team and the patient that needs same; and to provide health support for easier self-management of health related care.

Individual healthcare providers, organization and government should be sensitizing Nigerians on these new possibilities, while ensuring that investments should be tailored toward Telehealth to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to people in need of care.

The last trend we will be considering is the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated content, which is the Use of an AI-powered platform to create engaging, conversion-optimized and human-quality copy or content. This ranges from social media adverts to web landing pages and blog posts. These platforms make use of algorithms that pulls up related content on topics that are of interest to us and use synonyms to bypass plagiarism while ensuring coherence through sample learning copies that have been fed in to train the robots. Artificially Intelligent writers are in high demand today, offering accurate country-relevant content generation through platforms, using state-of-the-art models to create articles from just a given headline. Due to its access to huge amount of online data AI-content-generators can create suggestions while we are trying type a search phrase on Google search.

What we should be doing with a sense of urgency are to realize that working remotely has come to stay, hence we must become familiar with these technology trends. We also need to quickly begin a lifelong plan to continuously improve our skillset and certifications to better our option in the global workspace, while engaging with various relevant virtual trainings. In addition, we need to find ways to collaborate with others in order to create new learning possibilities for the masses and build up on our chances as Nigerians for globally competitive work that helps us earn in foreign currencies. The foregoing is definitely is not to undermine the possibilities of creating online businesses (solutions and platforms) that can be grown from playing locally to the global through a tested model, good funding and access to relevant business information.