Future of IT as a department in an Organization

It would be a great mistake, if one can’t understand and prepare for the changes that are happening in the Information Technology part of the business and corporate world. These changes are happening in such a phase that is leading to a fundamental shift in direction of the way the job functions in an IT department is constructed, staffed and operated today. All these changes if not most of them are non-reversible in nature; means the shift is permanent and is not a temporary phenomenon. The technological advances combined with social responsiveness fuel these changes with a greater acceptance. Enterprises and organizations as always follow the individual consumers in realizing and adapting to these changes.

If an organization believes these changes are removing the traditional way of working and map it the elimination of the jobs would end up in a dead end. The reality is these shift demands new skills and new set of workforce economics. Here the cost is directly proportional to the talent density than the physical count of the employees.

As a two part series, let me articulate the changes and their effect on their traditional outlook of IT as a business unit.

• Platform architecture: One of the most significant trends that might impact an IT business unit is that the age of “viewing everything through an application lens is coming to an end.” Instead, platform architectures will be selected primarily to cope with soaring volumes of data and the complexity of data management, not for their ability to support applications. The tried and true relational database will not go away, but it will soon start to make way for other types of databases – streaming databases, for instance – that mark a significant departure from what IT departments and business users have relied on for decades.
• Cloud Computing: The focus will shift from simple infrastructure solutions to developing cloud strategies that deliver increased functionality and flexibility using a mix of public and private cloud-based application and platform services. While many challenges remain, cloud is nonetheless poised to change the face of enterprise computing. The adaptation to cloud from the application hosting perspective changes the traditional IT of running ‘on-premises’ to ‘on-demand’ mode; a completely different set off skill sets are required to manage and reap the cost benefits of the cloud infrastructure & applications. 
• Data Security: The fortress mentality, in which all IT has to be architected to be foolproof, is giving way to a security architecture that responds proportionately to threats when and where they happen.” As a result, the role of people in data security will decline, replaced by automated capabilities that detect, assess, and respond immediately. The IT becomes a hosted environment; a variety of automated, industry-tested applications will take over your ‘organization specific’ security, both at the infrastructure and application levels. Organizations have to be practical and evolve to the maturity of understanding the new-age threats and manage the changes in adopting and implementing the standards.
• Analytics: Companies that continue to view analytics, as a simple extension of business intelligence will be “severely underestimating analytics’ potential to move the needles on the business.” Among other failings, traditional BI does not take advantage of the wealth of unstructured data that is now available. IT leaders will need to work closely with business leaders to identify where analytics can be leveraged effectively, as well as the proper mix of services required to optimize analytics capabilities across the enterprise. The organizations have to turn their focus from a traditional transactional reporting to a world of agile, real real time and enable predictive analysis.
• Architecture: Information technology is evolving from a world that is server-centric to one that is service-centric. Companies are quickly moving away from monolithic systems that were wedded to one or more servers toward finer-grained, reusable services distributed inside and outside the enterprise. The goal: to decouple infrastructure, systems, applications, and business processes from one another. This approach is well have it’s best benefits, if the analytics is taken into consideration as explained in the previous step.
• User Experience: Today, business process design is driven by the need for optimization and cost reduction. Tomorrow it will be driven by the need to create superior user experiences that help to boost customer satisfaction. Great user experiences will require more layered approaches than what is typical today. As such, application design will be a multidisciplinary exercise: Typically handled today by IT architects and business owners, tomorrow it will involve optimization from the perspective of the process actor, with the emphasis on simplicity and on removing inefficiencies. The power of the mobile devices and the experience of the consumers with them will drive the expectations and will dictate the successful applications with satisfied users.