Just as top athletes enter “the flow” when they perform at their best, when everything simply comes together, in 2015 more of us will work “in the flow,” at the top of our abilities, as what we need to upskill and do our best work simply “comes together” for us as we are working–thanks to advanced enterprise search & relevance technology.

Many profound and accelerating workplace changes are converging to make this possible: The digitization of the workplace, “so-lo-mo” digital natives approaching a majority of the workforce, the growing skills shortage, the rapid movement of corporate data to the cloud and importantly, the consumerization of IT and of organizations. Coveo executives look to our customer base, the analyst community, other technology innovations, as well as consumer Internet trends to report what we believe will be the major trends changing how we work, driven by search-based apps in 2015:

1: We stop reinventing the wheel because we can easily use information from every system, at our fingertips, and know what everyone in our organization knows. Companies in 2015 embrace the “ecosystem of record” over the system of record. As applications become even more fragmented and specialized, as companies move to the cloud, and while the monolithic platform model fades, IT and business leaders will virtually consolidate and make available all of their rich knowledge and information stores across the many systems employees engage with every minute of every day.

2. We upskill as we work by gaining the right knowledge exactly when we need it. in 2015, search-based apps inject relevant knowledge and experts into our work, wherever and whenever we need. These apps become prevalent as they help employees become more proficient, able to quickly change gears and tackle ever higher-level work.

3: We empower our customers with the knowledge they need, when they need it, to solve even their toughest issues. Digital native customers want to help themselves, using the device and channel they like best, and in 2015 we help them do just that–successfully. Customer service leaders employ search-based apps to help these highly competent customers discover solutions regardless of where the answers reside…in communities, portals, other websites, systems, and more.

4: We work smarter on our smartphones and tablets, with personalized information always at our fingertips. World-class mobile user experience is ubiquitous in 2015, and mobile browsing outpaces classic computer use, creating challenges for traditional applications. New and ubiquitous, mobile enterprise search interfaces provide the knowledge we need, at the moment we need it, within smaller real estate for us in 2015.

5: We engage with and trust our search-based apps because they show us what we know exists—and even more importantly, they recommend what we don’t know exists but matters to our work. This is possible because the security constraints that keep our IT teams from opening all of our systems (where we know the answer exists even though we can’t find it!) are solved, even for hybrid on-premise/cloud-based search applications. The critical cybersecurity challenge is solved as search-based apps consolidate security models across all systems, and are compliant with cloud security standards.

In upcoming blogs we will explore the innovations and requirements behind each of these trends.

What trends do you predict for how we work in 2015?