FORCES SHAPING THE FUTURE OF IT

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.Here Here are the unseen irresistible forces taking charging:

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

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.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.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. 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.Box CIO Paul Chapman says he’s seeing spending that’s more focused on business function than department.

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.Expect more IT departments to incorporate agile practices and methodologies not only in their own work but in partnerships across the business.

Flexibility
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.”

Sources:
Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible;Book by coauthor  Booz Allen Hamilton