Businesses equipped to take advantage of new opportunities today will become unstoppable tomorrow. This is the fundamental assurance and central promise we hear from technology vendors today as they urge us to think about tomorrow and how we might make our business operations future-ready.
But what does this first statement really mean? What are these new opportunities and how do we equip ourselves for an uncertain tomorrow? Is unstoppable always a good thing and how do we maintain control on the unknown road ahead?
Believing the unbelievable
At its most conceptual level, being able to plan for the future comes down to opening our mind. As recently as a decade ago we had very little belief in the ubiquitous use of tablet computers, but today we have the iPad and more besides. Platform changes can happen at any time and radically reshape the way we live our lives. This is what it means to be future-ready.
Understanding that these platform changes can manifest themselves not just in terms of technology, but also in areas like medicine, transport, public services or even the legal trade (for want of four broad examples) is part of the ‘new belief’ mindset. This is what it means to be future-ready.
Accepting that what we today consider to be impossible could soon be possible is part of this process. This is why a new professional breed of so-called ‘futurologists’ (or futurist) has now developed. Futurologists challenge us to believe that one day soon we will live to 200, we will soon be printing meat for human consumption and hyper speed transport systems of the future will reach nearly 1000 miles per hour over land. This is what it means to be future-ready.
The future’s relationship’ with technology
While not every disruptive future innovation will be an information technology development in the purest sense of IT, we do know that technology will underpin all possible futures. A key facilitating change in future tech frameworks, platforms, storage and networks is the shift to ‘software-defined’ controls.
The ability to make change happen at the speed of building, managing or manipulating software rather than having to ‘rip and replace’ at the hardware level is fundamental in terms of our new relationship with IT.
The human-machine disconnect
The problem we face today, even if we accept that future-ready businesses are more ready for change than any other, is that technology moves faster than people. Specifically, we mean that datacenter technologies are speeding towards increasingly integrated systems driven by software-defined intelligence, but the skills to operate what we could call ‘infrastructure-as-code’ at this level don’t always exist.
As analyst house IDC has explained in its Future Ready Enterprise: Driving Business results Today while Preparing for the Challenges of Tomorrow white paper, “A future-ready organization is one that is always extending the abilities of its IT infrastructure and applications while also pursuing IT organizational practices that enable it to identify and address changing business and technology needs. The future-ready organizations not only react quickly to market changes but also are better able to become disruptors themselves.”
Where do we go today, for tomorrow
Traditionally siloed organisations are, perhaps unsurprisingly, finding both the wider and specific elements of the new digitisation transformation hard to bring on line quickly. Key to making future-ready happen will be open system foundations, open platforms and open source – being ‘locked in’ in the post-millennial age is almost universally accepted to be a bad thing.
Looking ahead, there are no blueprints to tell us what’s next. But we do know that the future will more definable, more componentised and more specialised. This new and ‘more tunable’ future is a place where we accept that change is the only constant and that software runs the world. This is what it means to be future-ready.
For more information on what it means to be Future Ready, click here for the Future Ready Enterprise: Driving Business results Today while Preparing for the Challenges of Tomorrow white paper info brief.
Adrian Bridgwater
Latest Posts:
Tags: Business, Future Ready, Productivity