The effects of the Corona pandemic and the steadily increasing use of cloud services are changing the world of work and confronting many IT managers with entirely new challenges. They have to take on new areas of responsibility and fulfill the new requirements for flexibility and automation at all levels. The core disciplines of IT strategy, IT security, IT infrastructure, software, data, and processes remain the same, but the underlying challenges in these areas have evolved. The trends that are emerging for 2023 will require new changes:
Our IT Readiness Trend Report 2023 supports managers, decision-makers, and experts in the IT sector in identifying the trends of the year and evaluating the planned activities for change in the IT area. With our detailed descriptions of these trends, we offer the opportunity to gather inspiration for new projects in your daily work. At the same time, the trend report is an important basis for our IT readiness check, which examines IT, existing structures, and systems in a pragmatic, interactive approach to determine whether they are ready for the challenges ahead.
In the coming years, a variety of upcoming changes will continue to confront experts and decision-makers with the challenge of developing new solutions. In addition to the same technical challenges that large corporations have to solve in their IT field, medium-sized companies mostly require even more pragmatic solutions. Under resource limitations and a shortage of skilled workers, it is getting more and more difficult to keep serving the needs of all users, partners, and customers inside and outside the company. Through our trend report, our experts identify the most important developments in the IT readiness dimensions and support you in evaluating and developing solutions. As part of the digitization wave that rolled through many companies in 2021/22, the operational and strategic relevance of IT units was once again underlined. At the same time, new demands on IT have arisen in many places as a result, which clearly exceed the previous range of tasks and competencies. In this context, many IT units need to ask themselves what their duties are in 2023 and leaders need to provide answers on how these new requirements and competencies will be integrated.
Digital Decarbonization
Alongside increasing performance requirements, IT units also need to consider the ecological footprint they want to leave behind. Integrated concepts for using waste heat from hardware components or supporting other departments in the efficient, digital recording and processing of their ecological footprint intensify the pressure on IT areas to innovate.
Hybrid project management
Agile methods do not always have to be SCRUM or Kanban. In fact, it should be considered to combine the strengths of the different methods and thus solve the complexity of the project environment in agile standards, while the strategic projects are maintained in waterfall methods and Gant charts. Using hybrid methods takes the best of agile and waterfall approaches, combining them to optimize your processes. By 2023, both existing tools and the understanding of agile methods have matured to such an extent that entry can succeed better than ever before.
Post-Corona IT Department
The corona pandemic set the course for remote working worldwide. As a result, communication channels have been expanded and are already well-established in many companies. One of the advantages of this is that, due to the physical distance, previously unconsidered specialists can be recruited for one's own company and skills gaps can be covered. This trend is also recognizable and relevant in IT departments, where there is often a shortage of skilled workers. However, the systems required for this must be able to be operated remotely with external access. Therefore, the IT department is called upon to implement these requirements and to actively contribute to the recruitment of employees.
➡️ More than 30 other trends are carefully described in our Trend Report.
IT strategy is expected to play an ever greater role in the implementation of corporate goals and to build up new service functions that support the digital transformation of the company in an advising manner.
IT security, which lies as a cross-section above all other topics, presents experts with the challenge of ensuring security regardless of devices and locations due to its changing system architectures.
The range of tasks related to IT infrastructure is expanding increasingly, driven by stronger connections between production and office spaces, networking via 5G, and the growing demand for integration in platform solutions.
In the software sector, a paradigm shift is underway, from building software as a hierarchical, single construct to integrating it into service meshes and making more use of scalable structures and hyper-automation for higher flexibility and performance.
Developments in the area of data and processes show increasing automation of business processes, driven by greater availability of data, more effective interpretation along process mining methods, and the replacement of manual work by intelligent software modules.
Our IT readiness model provides the basis for future-proof and innovative IT in your company. Along the core dimensions of IT strategy, IT security, IT infrastructure, software, and data and processes, we outline the most important areas of action and changes on the path to modern corporate IT. We regularly expand the model with and integrate new trends and findings. Built on the experience of more than 2,500 IT and digital projects, the model forms the basis for the structured further enhancements of many medium-sized customers. It is specifically designed to produce targeted solutions and incorporate best practices as well as trends in the further development of your IT.
The "IT Readiness Check" is a tool to help our customers and partners evaluate how to deal with emerging trends, select the right measures to further enhance their company and IT organization, and develop a roadmap for the upcoming transformation challenges. These measures are based on the goals of the company's development as well as its current level of technological maturity.
As a highly experienced team of experts from strategy and organizational consulting, technology experts, and software developers, we have all the skills you need to master your transformation to a future-proof IT and digital organization.
➡️ Get the full study with over IT 30 trends now! You can download the complete report here.
The IT Readiness Trendreport is published by BITROAD - A SpinLab company in cooperation with Softline and Generic.