The start of a new year presents a good time for both reflection and planning, and as the leader of a business with hundreds of employees, I try to use this time to internalise learnings from across our organisation.

Naturally, when planning for the new year, it’s a good time to predict what new challenges your business might face and what opportunities those will present for your company.

There’s a lot of potential in 2019 for business to partake in the digital transformation of their current processes - but it does take careful planning to align teams around high level initiatives.

Here’s a snapshot of what I predict to be the biggest changes businesses should be aware of for 2019.

Security

2019 is a year in which we’ll see the role of security transition from “bouncer” to “bodyguard.” IT security in the past was all about not letting harm in. This could frustrate workers, who these days, like to source their own apps for productivity and integrate them into their workflow.

As these integrations and data transactions become more complex and routine, CIOs can’t just say “no access” anymore. A balance must be found between the consumerisation of IT and security in 2019 through broader adoption of SOC and ISO security standards, tighter integrations between various cloud providers, advanced encryption in cloud and on devices, non-intrusive monitoring, and AI.

Communication in the Workplace

A few years ago, people thought instant messaging would save them from email overload, but we are now suffering from communication overload spread across multiple channels.

I don’t expect instant messaging to become less popular anytime soon, but enterprises that rely upon messaging as a primary communication channel are already starting to realise they need a more unified platform that helps users work in ways that are more structured and organised.

In 2019, enterprises should seek out a platform that is able to unify systems used throughout the organisation, becoming the Digital Workplace that everyone at the company works in and connects activity to results.

The Rise of Data and Ops

Operations is becoming more critical to every function of a business. Why? Digital is creating mountains of data that can power decisions and unlock growth potential for companies - but only if the humans that form their teams can find and interpret it.

Operations teams make sure that data is accessible when needed and ensure that systems and humans are working together flawlessly to prioritise and execute work. Currently, there are over 1,300,000 operations jobs listed on LinkedIn: a testament to the growth in this role.

Similarly, IBM projects that over 2,700,000 new data analyst jobs will be created by 2020, to give the operations teams plenty of fuel to spread throughout the organisation.

Collaborative Work Management

Most enterprises are already embracing a collaborative work management (CWM) tool in some capacity - especially those that have aggressive growth plans for the next 2-5 years.

I expect that we will see more companies, large and small, begin to understand the very real benefits of CWMs and expand their deployments of CWM technology to more teams, to expand their value. By 2022, 70 percent of organisations leveraging CWM systems will report that their teams are significantly better performing, according to Gartner.

The pressure to do more work, and at an ever-increasing pace, will not only fuel an advanced collaborative work management platform with a robust automation feature-set.

It will force the adoption of lightweight project management methodologies across a variety of knowledge work teams. Ninety percent of successful digital transformation initiatives already started in Fortune 1,000 will have specific repeatable workflows and SOPs implemented by the end of 2021.

Automation and AI

While AI captures the imagination in the media, an even bigger workhorse for productivity is automation. With the shift to the digital economy, every organisation must reinvent some of its processes, leaving big opportunities to templatise and automate part of that work. This reduces the burden on employees to find and push information manually.

Opportunities like these are often-times simpler to conceptualise and execute than larger AI initiatives, thanks to self-service automation platforms, and don’t require rare skills or technologies.

If we look at the ROI of AI and automation initiatives in 2019, I predict that at least three quarters of it will not require sophisticated AI techniques and will rely on simpler automations, including templatisation of SOPs, statistics around repeatable work, and heuristics.

Andrew Filev is founder and CEO, Wrike.