9 forces shaping the future of IT

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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.
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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, weve 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.
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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 reports 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.
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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? Youd hear something like five years,
says Steve Rotter, CMO of OutSystems. Now its
24 months. If CIOs are feeling that kind of
pressure and sensitivity around speed and
agility, to me thats whats 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, theyre at the
table making decisions and developing strategies
that have a direct impact on the business.
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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 didnt 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 everyones job.
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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 hes actually seeing it
happen. A lot of it is just that marketing is
becoming more dependent on data, and its
becoming central to the way marketers work,
Rotter says. But its also a very clear
condemnation that the tools and technologies that
used to support marketing teams are rigid. So,
what youre seeing is organizations realizing
that. Theyre 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.
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Collaboration
The shift in spend doesnt 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,
theres 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.
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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 hes
seeing spending thats 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.
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Agility
Theres 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 firms internal customer satisfaction
surveys jumped 40 percent by introducing agile
practices between departments. By integrating
the business into our agile teams, weve
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.
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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 thats 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.
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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.
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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
Boxs 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.
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Were seeing clients starting pilots for complex
decision making, Booz Allen Hamiltons Zutavern
says, optimizing large IT portfolios, and
responding to adaptive cyber intrusions. Andrew
Filev, CEO of work management platform Wrike,
agrees. Filevs company worked with AirBnBs
marketing and IT teams to create an automated
process that triggers new projects, duplicates
timelines and automates updates from contributors
to AirBnBs 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.
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Ubiquity
Julie Woods-Moss, 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, Woods-Moss says.
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Booz Allen Hamiltons 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 havent
even conceived of yet. Were 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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