On March 16th I participated in the STKI summit by the local analysts company STKI.
The company headed by Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf is focused on the Israeli market. The theme of this year conference was: Finding the Right Balance: Standardize vs. Innovate.
Presentations were based on an Israeli market survey performed by the company.
The company's analysts' presentations topics were Infrastructure Trends, Applications Trends, Office of the CIO trends and Infrastructure Services Trends, followed by wrap-up IT Trends presentation by Jimmy.
Jimmy's Keynote presentation included two parts: The first topic (and the more interesting topic in my opinion) was directions and trends. This part was not Israeli market centric.
The second topic summed up the surrey's results and was limited to the Israeli market. The local companies in each category (e.g. Storage Hardware, Integration Software), were ranked by Revenue and Client's Mind Share.
I was surprised to find myself appearing in 11th place in the Infrastructure related Consulting/Analysts.
The most important changes according to Jimmy and according to IT leaders (Microsoft's CEO Steve Balmer, SAP's co-founder Hasso Plattner, Steve Jobs) and Academy researchers (Andrew McAfee, Zygmunt Bauman, Rakesh Khurana) quoted by him are:
- Home User Centric IT – The home users are Beta "site" for new software instead of organizations.
- Enterprise 3.0 focused on Competitive advantage in addition to Enterprise 2.0 focused on Business Processes transformation.
- Event Driven IT systems
The result of the combination of all these changes will be a very dynamic and flexible (Liquid) IT World with almost no boundaries between Private Life and work activities.
The theme of finding the right balance implies loosing the balance found few years ago. The first part of the Keynote presentation describes a fundamental change taking place following last year's recession.
No doubt, that the predicted change is a radical change. A new world will necessarily require a new balance. Finding the new balance is not an easy task. The new balance will not be limited to IT, because the new world implies change in organizational and cultural issues in addition to the IT changes.
My Take
- The New IT implies higher degree of Complexity.
Enterprise with large variety of End User Devices, Events handling mechanisms in addition to Processes, Services, Components and programs, and deploying some Core Systems in its Data Center and other Core Systems in the Cloud will be more complex than current enterprises.
Handling the growing Complexity is a must. Complexity could be handled by hiding it (e.g. by using Abstraction in SOA or Virtualization implementations) or by actually reducing it by less heterogeneous platforms and applications.
- Perceptual Adaptation is the key for competitive advantage.
- Mobility is a significant trend. The effects of lack of time or place separation between Work related activities and other activities are beyond computing or IT.
- In my opinion the other significant trend is Event Driven. Reality is Event Driven. Until the last years IT systems modeled Systems and Processes, but did not model systematically events processing.
The second generation of SOA implementations includes concurrent implementation of Event Driven Architecture (EDA).
Implementing Real Time Enterprise requires Event Processing, because in many cases business events processing take place immediately after an event (or State Transition) occurred.
Mobility, enables alerting a consumer or an employee immediately after an event occurs.
Comments
Thank you for this interesting post!
I think that definately the complexity that CIOs will need to handle is growing and furthermore: it is not a complexity that they "already know". In most cases, it is a new kind of complexity that is caused by new technologies such as Cloud. For example, SaaS is a shift in the way organizations are consuming software services. Among the many positive advantages of SaaS, it also means that CIOs / IT organizations will need to handle a "new kind" of integration challenge: how do you integrate these "SaaS" islands? how do you integrate SaaS apps with legacy apps? what are the data management implications? while there are technical solutions to every question, these are new architecture issues that have to be dealt with.
Furthermore, BPM is redefining the way new processes are planned, executed, refined, and maintained over time... so everything is changing. No doubt, complexity is growing and the IT role is changing.
Thanks,
Einat