IT is on the precipice of unprecedented change. Every company, now in the business of technology, is experiencing glimmers of larger shifts to come: automation, decentralized technology budgets, rapid adoption of cloud-based services, and most recently, artificial intelligence as a business necessity.
Thanks to these emerging and converging trends, technology is increasingly freeing workers from routine tasks, from the warehouse to the C-suite. Massive amounts of data are being ingested in real time, as business decisions are beginning to be offloaded to machines, leaving more time to focus on planning, pursuing leads, and adopting new technologies.
IT stands at the center of all this, poised to change dramatically. To help you navigate the years ahead, we’ve broken down the forces currently shaping the future of IT work, offering insights from fellow technology leaders on the long-term impact of changes emerging today.
Automation
Finding, extracting, and conforming all this information so it can be used to drive decision-making has been a complex and labor-intensive task for decades.
Freed from the wrangling and maintaining, IT will have more resources to devote to moving the business forward.
I see the biggest impact that automation will make on IT is that it will accelerate the shift from ‘running IT’ to innovating for the future,” says Chris Bedi. Also, we'll see an improvement in employee engagement as people aren't spending time on mundane tasks.
If you go back in time and ask, ‘What is the window you have for competitors to really have an impact on your business?’ You’d hear something like five years. Now it’s 24 months. If CIOs are feeling that kind of pressure and sensitivity around speed and agility, to me that’s what’s going to drive a lot of interesting dynamics in the marketplace.
The pace of change in technology is moving increasingly fast and businesses must keep up to stay competitive. With this greater reliance on the technical underpinning and its impact on the bottom line, IT professionals are evolving to have a greater sense of business and customer acumen. IT is no longer a back office that you call when you need something, they’re at the table making decisions and developing strategies that have a direct impact on the business.
Security
The security threat landscape continues to evolve, CIOs and IT departments that didn’t focus on these areas are now finding that this is a major risk to their business and need to be diligent in assessing new tools to protect against new threats. The demand is currently outpacing the supply and IT continues to be caught shorthanded.
As this threatscape evolves, IT may see security cease to be an isolated function and instead become an integral element of everyone’s job.
Spend
In many businesses, cloud-based services, including marketing technology apps, are causing the technology spend to be spread throughout the business.
A lot of it is just that marketing is becoming more dependent on data, and it’s becoming central to the way marketers work. But it’s also a very clear condemnation that the tools and technologies that used to support marketing teams are rigid. So, what you’re seeing is organizations realizing that. They’re building flexible applications on top of those legacy systems.
And the developers who create those applications may not be employed by IT. Instead, they may be hired by the marketing department directly.
Collaboration
Four in 10 line of business respondents in a recent CompTIA survey said that their department works jointly with IT to determine which hardware, software, services, and other tech solutions they will deploy. Just 19 percent said IT handles all such decisions, with even fewer -- 14 percent -- saying that their individual business unit pulls all the strings.
Non-discretionary and non-directly IT accountable costs are still managed centrally by IT, so such a separation is not always [the case]. If the service requires interconnecting with other parts of the business’ systems reference architecture and needs to be tested in an end-to-end, integrated way, IT is then needed to support the delivery. SaaS provides the freedom from infrastructure and a majority of operational overhead, but doesn't free IT from the rest of the services that are needed to implement and evolve a complex end-to-end business architecture.
Agility
By integrating the business into our agile teams, we’ve increased collaboration and shifted IT to a more consultative role as opposed to being an order-taker. “Collaboration with other departments has been critical to our success. The main driver of this is our move to a more agile framework.
Expect more IT departments to incorporate agile practices and methodologies not only in their own work but in partnerships across the business.
Flexibility
The biggest breakthroughs, come from combining business knowledge, technical expertise, and soft skills. The most important traits for succeeding in business technology in the future are flexibility in overcoming setbacks and willingness to abandon an idea that’s not working to experiment with something new.
And, as much hand wringing occurs over the future of automation and robotics, some argue that there are innate human qualities that will remain in demand.
We will likely see an increased demand for ‘robot-proof’ skills that continue to be uniquely suited to humans. Many soft skills tend to fall into this category of being more robot-proof than some of the more technical or ‘hard’ skills.
Machines tend to be good at performing tasks that are narrow, describable, and repeatable, making space for those jobs that require unpredictability. For example, interpersonal skills, collaborative qualities and workers who can draw from diverse experiences will continue to be in demand. However, indicators suggest that jobs involved in helping to advance technology are more resilient and tend to have a place working alongside robots.
In other words, the ineffable quality of adaptability will be that much more vital for future success in IT.
Symbiosis
Ultimately, anything that has enough data and repeatable patterns could end up transforming into an AI-driven process. The shift is to have people focus on the higher-value work and less on the mundane tasks. Another sizable shift is the one affecting touch, text and talk interactions with backend services, which is moving away from the disparate point-and-click interfaces we have in place today.
We’re seeing clients starting pilots for complex decision making, optimizing large IT portfolios, and responding to adaptive cyber intrusions.
The future of IT is more systems that are automated in this way, and also more integrated across systems and teams. Automation can produce more visibility and faster communication. Together with automation, AI and work management are opening doors for improved processes within companies.
Ubiquity
As API-enabled, automated systems will be able to handle the majority of day-to-day IT issues, the IT team will be freed up to focus on innovating through new technologies and delivering more strategic value for different lines of business.
CIOs and other leaders need to become more comfortable with machines making decisions. Meanwhile, they must allow business units the flexibility to create new solutions they haven’t even conceived of yet. We’re seeing more platforms-as-a-service, which allow everyone to come together to unleash the power of their data to fuel creativity, innovation, and a culture of experimentation.
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