In order to move forward you must sometimes look back. In looking back, we’ve seen some patterns arise and believe these to no longer be trends, but core competencies of the market. This year we expect to see a renewed interest in some of these tried and true methodologies. These are no longer trends in IT, but rather standard practices and should be a focus for the business to grow and leverage.
This coming year, I think we’ll see a renewed focus on the alignment of IT operations and strategic business goals. Competition in all markets continues to place pressure on both disciplines of optimization and innovation. IT departments continue to get tasked to do more with less.
- Business Value and Business Technology Optimization:
Enterprises will continue to increase focus on the value that IT and PMOs bring to the business—not solely what these departments are costing the company. Rather than cost-cutting, we’ll start to see more companies invest IT dollars effectively, by moving away from legacy on premise PPM and APM solutions, and into the Cloud.
- Predictive Metrics and Analytics:
It won’t be enough to create reports and dashboards to share with the team. The value of the PMO and the work that IT does will be micro-analyzed and will continue to be viewed as critical business partners contributing to the success of the overall business. Therefore, investing in solutions that provide relevant, detailed visibility and transparency are “table stakes” in determining the value of these departments.
- Project, Application, and Resource Management will be viewed as a trio:
It’s not enough to simply focus on managing applications or projects any longer. The driver will be smart resource allocation on work that allows Executive Teams to prosecute innovation driving competitive advantage in the market place. There is less tolerance for failed projects today than ever before.
- Integrating Critical Business Systems such as Agile Solutions and ERP systems with existing solutions will be a key ingredient to the success of the overall company:
We believe that people should be allowed to work in environments that enable the most productivity. Integration between systems is now a significant requirement especially given the plethora of mergers and acquisitions that took place last year.
- Two major shifts will continue to occur:
First, we’ve moved from an era of homogeneity to heterogeneity. In the Post-PC era, the focus isn’t on hardware and operating system, it’s all about applications. Our lives are run now by applications, not by platform. Secondly, the change in mobility is going to drive a new definition of a Knowledge Worker and every industry will also be redefined, because the Post-PC era will create 1.3 billion or more knowledge workers in the next 5 years. We are in an exploding phase, and these new technologies are creating untold opportunities for all of us to take advantage of, including IT.
- The role characteristic of the CIO continues to evolve.
Because business processes are becoming increasingly complex and the applications are a composite of many interdependent IT applications and services, CIO’s must become shamans leading the right development for the right business reasons. They will move from optimizers of the processes to managers of Portfolios. They will be accountable for the return on investments by Portfolio not simply individual projects or application work. This will be a dramatic and strategic shift.
- The development and delivery of enterprise applications will significantly be influenced by the demand for easier to use and faster to deploy requirements.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and many others have changed the way we consume applications. These companies inspired a new wave of user friendly demands which are now translating into the same requirements for IT enterprise offerings. Complexity is out, simplicity is in. These new mandates will certainly create pressure on both IT, and vendors who sell to IT. We expect that in the next three to five years we will witness some of the most challenging and innovative opportunities that technology has to offer, and we are proud to be part of it.
Innotas will continue to evolve and meet these challenges. As we grow and design new releases, we will build to our priorities which address these changes above. We will continue to make easier to use, and faster to deploy improvements to our offering, and always with passion and prejudice towards making our users more productive.
