9 forces shaping the future of IT
9 forces shaping the future of IT
New technologies and approaches will free IT leaders to
cut costs, save time and let machine intelligence do the heavy lifting.
Paul Heltzel (CIO (US)) 11 July, 2017 20:00
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
Automation is fast becoming mainstream, moving from
experimental projects to the business world. And while automation in business may
have a profound effect on employment in the future — a 2015 McKinsey report
suggests half of the job functions performed today by people could be automated
using existing technology — the impact on IT will be the freedom to be more
strategic.
“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,” says Timo Elliott, vice president and global
innovation evangelist at SAP. Elliott cites the 2015 McKinsey report’s
assertion that AI and machine learning advances could shave off about
two-thirds of the time it takes to do this sort of mundane, time-intensive
work.
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, CIO at ServiceNow. “Also, we'll see an improvement in
employee engagement as people aren't spending time on mundane tasks.”
Speed
With automation in place, speed and agility will be key.
Technology initiatives that used to take half a decade to be adopted are now in
place in just a couple years. This will only accelerate — to your benefit or
peril.
“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,” says Steve Rotter, CMO of OutSystems. “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,” says Rackspace CIO Ryan
Neading. “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
Of course, along with opportunities, rapidly changing
technology also introduces new problems -- both in identifying holes in
security and finding the talent to address them.
“The security threat landscape continues to evolve,” says
John Mandel, senior vice president of engineering at Continuum. “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
As technology becomes an increasingly significant line
item across business units, companies will change the way they look at their
budgets — and how technology is developed and maintained by the organization as
a whole.
In many businesses, cloud-based services, including
marketing technology apps, are causing the technology spend to be spread
throughout the business. OutSystems’ Rotter cites a prediction that caused a
stir several years ago by Gartner, which said that by 2017 CMOs would be
spending more on technology than CIOs. And now he’s actually seeing it happen.
“A lot of it is just that marketing is becoming more
dependent on data, and it’s becoming central to the way marketers work,” Rotter
says. “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
The shift in spend doesn’t have to mean a complete shift
in power. Instead, expect deeper collaboration between IT and other business
units.
Carolyn April, senior director of industry analysis at
CompTIA, says that, in addition to tech budget being spread around, there’s
evidence that business divisions are getting better at working together to
employ new technology, and, somewhat surprisingly, “rogue” tech adoption may be
on the wane.
“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,”
she says. “Just 19 percent said IT handles all such decisions, with even fewer
-- 14 percent -- saying that their individual business unit pulls all the
strings.”
Perhaps more interesting is evidence of increased
fluidity in this area, as April cites a quarter of respondents report that tech
purchase processes “can present in a combination of ways: IT only,
business-unit only, or collaboration between both groups. That said, all signs
indicate that the role non-IT business units will play in both strategic and
tactical decision-making for technology will only increase as businesses march
toward the cloud and all things digital.”
Box CIO Paul Chapman says he’s seeing spending that’s
more focused on business function than department. “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
There’s nothing particularly cutting edge about the need
for soft skills and efficient collaboration between departments. But there is a
way to apply technology concepts across the business for better communication.
Julia Davis, senior vice president and CIO at Aflac, says
the insurance firm’s internal customer satisfaction surveys jumped 40 percent
by introducing agile practices between departments.
“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,” she says. “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
Booz Allen Hamilton vice president Angela Zutavern is the
co-author of The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human
Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible. In the book, she and her co-author Josh
Sullivan argue that a partnership between machine intelligence and human
intellect will form the business model of the future. But for this model to
work, flexibility is key.
“The biggest breakthroughs,” says Zutavern, “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,” says Jeremy Auger, chief strategy officer for
Desire2Learn.
“Machines tend to be good at performing tasks that are
narrow, describable, and repeatable,” Auger adds, “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
Headlines about automation and AI can be alarming.
Gartner has even released a survey about the most hyperbolic terms used to
describe the future of work, which frequently include “disrupt, steal or
threaten.” But most IT pros we surveyed see automation creating new
opportunities — as long as we can establish a symbiotic relationship with the
machines.
“Ultimately, anything that has enough data and repeatable
patterns could end up transforming into an AI-driven process,” says Box’s
Chapman. “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.”
Alongside this evolution in the foundation of how we
interact with machines will be greater meshing between humans and machine
intelligence when it comes to business processes and decision-making.
“We’re seeing clients starting pilots for complex
decision making,” Booz Allen Hamilton’s Zutavern says, “optimizing large IT
portfolios, and responding to adaptive cyber intrusions.”
Andrew Filev, CEO of work management platform Wrike,
agrees. Filev’s company worked with AirBnB’s marketing and IT teams to create
an automated process that triggers new projects, duplicates timelines and
automates updates from contributors to AirBnB’s new Trip Experiences product.
“The future of IT is more systems that are automated in
this way, and also more integrated across systems and teams,” Filev says.
“Automation can produce more visibility and faster communication. Together with
automation, AI and work management are opening doors for improved processes
within companies.”
Ubiquity
Julie Moss-Woods, chief innovation officer of Tata
Communications, sees the evolution of automation in digital strategies setting
the stage for a more responsive IT work experience.
“Automation will pave the way for a simpler, more
real-time IT environment, where the right person -- or machine -- is able to
get the right information, at the right time and place, accelerating the
development and roll-out of new services,” she says.
And this ability to quickly deliver targeted technical
solutions will pervade the business.
“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,” Moss-Woods says.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s Zutavern goes so far as to say that
machine intelligence is essentially a new form of business partner -- and it
deserves a seat at the boardroom table.
“CIOs and other leaders need to become more comfortable
with machines making decisions,” Zutavern says. “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.”
Comments
Post a Comment