Page 81 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 201581Furthermore, it is highly likely that companies’ diversity will increase over time and thatthese skills will therefore be more and more necessary, for several reasons. Firstly, because the globalisation process will carry on advancing and companies will adopt increasingly more refined procedures for locating their processes in different geographical areas. Secondly, because breakthroughs in automated translation systems will make it possible for more and more people from different cultures to communicate with each other, especially as this process will alsogo hand-in-hand with greater Internet accessof workers from all over the world. And lastly, because it is highly likely that companies will end up realising the intrinsic value of diversity in creating value. In this regard, a report states that 83% of executives think that a diverse workforce will help them generate value for a greater variety of customers and markets, 82% think that it can enrich the organisation’s talent, and 80% believe that diversity can providea competitive advantage (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2014). In this connection, the mission of the publication DiversityInc isto promote information on how companies benefit from diversity. It has compiled an index that shows that a company’s economic results are greater when diversity is properly managed (DiversityInc, 2013, 2014).All in all, workforces will be increasingly diverse. This will make it necessary to work collabora- tively, breaking down the classic structure of watertight departments, and this way of working will be increasingly dependent on distributed networks where the physical location of the professionals will be less important.Identifying trendsThe number of new applications and systems that arise every day as the cause and effect of a similar number of market trends is countless. Some of them stabilise and become set patterns, whereas others simply die out. As this is an upward and outward trend, it is increasingly necessary for professionals to be capable of interpreting the market properly in order to identify future trends, at least in the medium term, so as not to invest time or money in acquiring knowledge that later proves useless. Identifying these trends and the accompanying technologies is becoming a real challenge for companies, because their survival is linked to their ability to create parallel business models.Professionals must be capable of identifying the trends and technologies that are here to stay, creating parallel business models.There are at least two lines of work through which companies can anticipate or at least keep up with market changes and it is essential for professionals to acquire the skills that will allow their companies to benefit from them.The first of these lines has been called big data and refers to a new generation of technologies and architectures that allow value to be created through the rapid capturing, discovery and anal- ysis of large volumes of a great variety of data (Olofson, C. W. & Vesset, D., 2012). As for identifying trends, the most significant feature of this group of technologies and architectures is itsJesús Alcoba