Is IT doomed?
Cloud computing is without doubt a disruptive business model. It is in the process of disrupting almost every element of the computing industry – including technologists themselves, especially those who are members of corporate IT teams.
Early on in the story of cloud, predictions of a massive reduction in corporate IT jobs were rife, leading many in IT teams to feel they should slow cloud’s adoption for fear of their own jobs. Since then, the dust has settled somewhat and those lay-offs have not occurred.
Instead, a few trends have emerged. Many of those who preferred to work directly with the technology but whose functions have diminished within the enterprise have gone to work with the cloud service providers, and others along the cloud service supply chain.
Production applications hit the cloud
For the rest, the need for technologists within the corporation remains and will remain, as the migration of production applications in large enterprises into the cloud is blooming. Even in smaller businesses this holds true as the cloud makes the kinds of services that previously only large organisations could afford – such as supply chain management, analytics and customer relationship management – available to them. This means that there will be a need for technologists – those who can manage multiple clouds, integrate infrastructures and administer databases – in those organisations too.
Wherever IT team members end up, business skills will be needed. Technical complexity remains to be managed and resolved, so awareness of business needs and the requirement to contribute to revenue are likely to command a premium. This will mean helping the business make technology choices from a business not a technology perspective: helping to drive the best and most successful technology integration will be key. So organisations have moved IT staff into roles such as business analyst, business architect, application developer, technical analyst or user support.
Age of the technology strategist
In other words, those individuals will become technology strategists. Data management will become their field, enabling the business to understand its business environment, via technologies such as big data analytics and the Internet of things. At the same time, they will need to ensure that company data that’s collected is organised, processed and backed up in a structured way that reflects business needs.
So none of these cloud-wards moves and technologies implies that the need for a deep understanding of the technology will fade away: far from it, as technology continues to march on at a ferocious pace. You need only to look at the developments over the last five years or so around software defined storage, networks and datacentres, new database technologies, object-oriented storage, and new virtualisation technologies such as containerisation to recognise the truth of this.
Instead, each and every team member needs a business model overlay: when making a decision, thinking first and foremost about how the business will benefit is likely to become the key to job security.
Manek Dubash
Latest Posts:
Tags: Future Ready Workforce, Mobility, Technology