The state of uncertainty that has accompanied digital transformation for several years has changed with the proclamation of an orientation toward the "enterprise of the future", IDC said. So what does the future hold for IT organizations?
The current state of digital enterprises can be summed up in the words of renowned science fiction writer William Gibson, "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed."
While some of the CIOs have plunged into the nirvana of hyperspeed, hyperscale, and hyperconnectedness, others are grappling with the fragmentation of digital transformation initiatives, and are being hit by competitors and other market forces.
Payback time for digital CIOs has yet to come, but they have little room to maneuver. Competitors are stepping up their digital efforts. Under these conditions, CIOs can and should take concrete steps to create the digital "enterprise of the future."
Predictions based on IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2020 Predictions provide up-to-date information on technologies, markets and ecosystems to help CIOs understand future trends, their impact on the enterprise, and take action to succeed in 2020.
By 2024, 80% of digitally advanced organizations will change the “walled garden” model, in which everything is in charge of the IT department, to a self-service model. Providing libraries of cloud solutions, functions-as-a-service (FaaS), and tools that require little or no coding and are easily digestible by employees without good IT training helps businesses respond quickly to changes market needs without the involvement of IT specialists. We only need guarantees of the security and compatibility of these solutions.
For such a transformation, IT directors need to clearly understand the desired future state, which is determined jointly with business leaders and line managers (line of business, LOB) and serves as a reference point for employees of the enterprise and its partners cloud architect requirements.
Recommendations
Invest in training the developers who design and build such digital tools, maintain relationships with tool vendors, and leverage their expertise.
Build digital platforms with data, API services, and microservices to create open self-service environments.
Open labs and centers of excellence to share knowledge between LOB developers and IT staff.
By 2023, 65% of CIOs will lead their organizations in establishing innovation hubs, sharing best practices, and engaging engineers across the enterprise. Since the line divisions are actively using new technologies, they employ technically competent managers and specialists, the CIO should turn the IT service into a center for the exchange of best practices and knowledge about digital technologies. This will enable the architecture and integration of digital efforts across the enterprise. The CIO and IT staff need to think ahead of time about making changes to meet the changing business needs, ensure incremental evolution of IT services and platforms, gain new skills, and empower IT to influence in real time.
Recommendations
Work with business leaders to focus on creating a culture of peer learning and mentoring.
Develop a plan for expanding skills at each stage based on the pace of evolution that can be foreseen.
Build partner networks to fill skill and competency gaps.
Due to the increase in the number of cyber threats and the need for new functionality, 65% of enterprises will intend to modernize their legacy systems and invest in new technology platforms by 2023. Updates and support for legacy systems will not keep pace with growing cyberthreats and costly upgrades, but convincing business leaders to upgrade their systems will be challenging. It seems more realistic to implement new functionality and capabilities.
Recommendations
Prepare a business scenario that reflects critical business needs, such as improving customer experience, to justify the cost of a large-scale legacy replacement.
Develop an optimization and modernization plan, get the support of line managers.
Use security first architectures and design approaches to avoid new security vulnerabilities.
By 2023, 70% of IT services will use a containerization strategy and API, and will also try to expand the portability of applications and improve hosting flexibility. Successful organizations will implement containerization strategies and redouble their efforts to leverage APIs and microservices to further modernize, automate procedures, ensure compute independence, isolate applications, improve quality, and increase scalability. CIOs who do not use container-based approaches will feel the lack of flexibility, mobility and scalability, which will ultimately lead to a significant loss of competitiveness.
Recommendations
Microservices, together with containers, should form the basis of architectural models for all new applications.
Implement and extend DevOps for continuous evolution.
To meet the demand for on-demand compute resources, use serverless models and features that are provided as services.
Until 2022, 70% of IT services from implementers and operators will turn into designers and integrators of digital solutions and will define each product, service and process. The challenge for IT is that line units, through vendors, will begin to strengthen their role in technology creation and deployment, regardless of the nature of IT support, which will also change. If IT managers refuse to change roles and responsibilities when implementing technological solutions in line departments, the consequences for them will be very sad. It is much better for the CIO to plan and manage the transition in collaboration with line leaders.
Recommendations
Build a digital platform and API strategies to enable secure and fast integration of diverse applications and systems.
Invest in in-depth design and user experience expertise.
Create centers of excellence for selecting and validating digital software and tools.
By 2023, 80% of organizations will accelerate software development. This will deploy updates and review code at least once a week. Many IT departments have already moved from waterfall to agile application development (at least in theory), but so far they are not always able to cope with the rapid implementation of reliable code in small chunks to continuously create new business value. IT departments should be able to deploy updates every week, even if only individual applications need it. The CIO needs to redouble efforts to move towards true agile development and DevOps.
Recommendations
Think about products and business results, not projects.
Use a modular approach to improve adaptability.
Accelerate DevOps adoption, continuous integration and deployment.
Trust subordinates to search for new approaches to the creation and implementation of software.
By 2022, 40% of CIOs will lead innovation in their organizations. The choice of CIOs as leaders in the digital transformation process is quite logical. They are uniquely positioned to be innovative leaders, have a deep knowledge of digital technology, are able to predict business changes driven by new technologies, and, more importantly, understand how business works. IT leaders who are successful as an innovation leader are able to articulate their digital vision and engage others in its implementation. The technical savvy of IT professionals remains essential, but their success will depend on their ability to communicate, build relationships, and deliver on their commitments.
Recommendations
Form the foundation for reliable delivery of IT services and prevention of potential problems.
Promote a digital vision co-developed with line leaders.
Highlight limited but significant digital initiatives and demonstrate their business value.
Through 2022, the introduction of artificial intelligence tools to expand, optimize and accelerate IT operations will remain a major transformation initiative for 60% of corporate IT services. IDC's August 2019 CIO Sentiment Survey showed the following. Representatives of 54% of organizations are convinced that artificial intelligence is of significant value for automating IT operations and optimizing IT. The challenge for CIOs is not to automate IT, but to focus on the opportunities that deliver the most value. The CIO should start by defining his strategic goals, such as cutting costs, realigning talent, increasing IT capacity, and the like.
Recommendations
Partner with universities, consortia, start-ups, other organizations and alliances to increase the number of AI specialists.
Automate AI operations and initiatives to connect disparate components and streamline processes.
Make service quality an important metric for the effectiveness of your automation operations.
By 2024, 75% of CIOs will rethink the resources available to them, in particular budgets, assets and talent. Allocating resources in real time and ensuring enterprise agility will result in huge cost savings. CIOs strive to speed up processes and increase their agility, but face various obstacles. The most significant of these is perhaps the lack of flexibility in allocating the necessary funding and resources. Flexible resource allocation is a significant competitive advantage for CIOs. It is the essential foundation for achieving true organizational agility, which is one of the top priorities for IT transformation among CIOs.
Recommendations
Work closely with HR and Finance to build new systems for recruiting, performance management, and budgeting.
Keep in touch with line managers, create technologies to synchronize resources and budgets for IT and line departments.
Leverage flexible cycles for continuous planning and balanced IT resource allocation.
By 2023, 60% of CIOs will implement employee development programs approved by senior management. After a series of failed, scattered and unrelated employee engagement initiatives, the most effective CIOs will embark on strategic, targeted programs that include lifelong learning, engagement and innovation in digital workspaces. Immersive experiences and workspaces will drive productivity growth and attract the best talent. In most cases, such programs are a critical component of enterprise initiatives.
