Last week I was given the opportunity to sit on a panel of technical leaders and talk about the future of technology. I had a few notes about about how we're going to need to change our thinking about building capability and I thought I may as well capture and flesh out a touch the results of my crystal ball gazing here.
I spoke briefly about three areas:
- The people we hire
- The expectations of our users, and our expectations of them
- Where I think we’re going to need to invest and build capability
The people
Fairly obviously, Technology is getting more important to daily operations. But it's getting harder to hire people all the time. As we all keep hunting for talent, those who aren't offering the top end salaries will increasingly have to look nationally or even globally to recruit. I don't think moving the organisation to another city is a sustainable approach - at best, it will simply move the problem. Instead, I think we will increasingly see a more distributed workforce, and therefore more remote working. As staff turnover is identified as a major organisational cost, we’ll also see more emphasis staff retention - succession, training, individual growth and so on.
Whoever nails building a strong remote working culture and environment which encourages loyalty and celebrates and develops the individual is going to do very well. I think the secret to this is going to be building very strong communities of practice, and if I’m right we’ll see more “Head of Community” style work and roles growing up.
I also think we’ll see more Tech decisions based not on the best technical or product solution for the org, but the best fit for the skills we can grow or hire. This would suggest a lean towards the big names (the Microsofts, Googles and Amazons) who are heavily investing in training the Tech industry through free access to courses, sponsoring hackathons, and so on.
I believe this will be more acute as Automation is used to deliver more while avoiding the continual growth of IT departments. We will need to retain the skillsets to maintain that automation layer or we'll be seeing yet another wave of technical debt.
Expectations from and on users changing
In times of yore, users used to have to know something about operating a computer to install and use software. These days, users on a smart device can just touch an icon and get everything they need. This is a victory for accessibility and digital inclusion but it also means the gap between “technical” and “non-technical” user is widening. Our helpdesks and other support points will need to work with an increasingly broad ranges of questions, especially as tech like AI gains traction, and expectations for what it can do are all over the place.
We’ve also been seeing for years the expectations from users increasing as they use more SaaS products at home and demand the same sort of tools at work. To satisfy these needs, the cost of development is going to go up and cover a wider range of skillsets - and of course this links back to the earlier points about skill availability. Out of the box services are also going to be affected - vanilla deployment is going to be less palatable in the office, requiring more work for a good result especially with the current state of many internal systems user interfaces with respect to accessibility and usability.
This is particularly true regarding what have often been considered secondary requirements - accessibility and environmental sustainability for example. Users are (quite rightly!) far more vocal about accessibility needs, and we need to not just respond but get ahead of their requirements.
Other places we’re going to need to build capability
Technology is obviously an increasingly essential part of everything. I mentioned the effect on helpdesks above. We're also already seeing increasing amounts of security threats and the wider reaching impact of a successful attack. This will take us into an ever more expensive arms race in the Security field, which will mean building Security capability. This is going to need to be approached very carefully as it will be very expensive - everything I’ve said about skills shortages are far more acute in the world of InfoSec. Part of the Security picture is a renewed emphasis on good, basic engineering practice (such as patching) - but again, this places a challenge on building skills in our organisations.
We’re also generating and handling more data all the time, so inevitably we’ll see more human error leading to data loss. In fact, for any organisation a major security incident or data breach is only a matter of time now. If we are assuming that it is going to happen, there is a need for much more robust organisational responses to these scenarios which means building appropriate incident response and Business Continuity capabilities. Of course, just responding isn't enough so there will also need to be stronger data ownership throughout our organisations, with more people with data owner and controller roles. Organisations will need to fully grip their end to end processes and user journeys in ways that perhaps hasn’t been happening before.
Obviously there is a lot more that can be said about everything here!
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