The technologies are moving at the speed of business. Some are much matured. Some are not. In this context, what can IT Professionals do? A simple exploration, taking into account some of the trends already happening.
Idea 1: Become champions of innovation
Many SMEs (Small Medium Enterprise spend much of their time 75-80% on maintenance and support (lights on support). They should figure out a way get it done (vetted crowd sourcing / outsourcing) and become leaders in Innovation in their organization. Focus on increasing business automation, improving relations with customers / vendors using new tools and technologies.
Idea 2: Take help in strategic thinking skills
Explore deeply to understand how your company makes money. Understand deeply to figure out how to provide value to the company via services. Plan a strategy for disrupting the market. Hire “as a service expertise” to figure this out
Idea 3: Keep Dev team on fasting, and then do design thinking
Development teams are executing short term projects faster these days. Have them develop a 100 day plan for end-to-end framework. Then allow clients for continuous feedback that infuses empathy and design thinking.
Idea 4: Leverage your existing data and lift the earth
Everyone has amassed a huge amount of customer data, but much of it remains unstructured, siloed, and unavailable to the people who need it most. Now, ensure pulling insights from the data you've already got. IT teams should extend and collaborate across teams and ensure that marketing, product, factories and other departments are effectively using data already with them to make strategy, tactical and business decisions
Idea 5: Not just one cloud vendor
Explore using multiple cloud providers. This allows organizations to pick best of breed for each application, create more resiliency for critical apps. Development team focus on micro services architecture, whereas the data scientists can focus on Sage Maker or Tensor Flow.
Idea 6: Plan for work, not Job
Even Data centers getting “uber”ized. IT professionals need to focus on 10000 hours and interpersonal network, across teams, partners and even competitors. Short discussions can provide tipping point efficiencies that are off the charts
Idea 7: Regtechs on the horizon
We keep hearing data breaches every day and even more plans for compliance frameworks around the corners, from countries, from professional practices, and even judicial systems. New class of startups are getting nurtured by VCs, following the Fintech madness. Keep an eye on them. One or few more can help tackle the regulations using new tech revolution
Idea 8: Hello, buddy (botty?)
AI driven bots, Voice enabled devices are changing the consumer landscape completely. There is still quite a bit of confusion on how to make money out of these services. But NLP / AI driven Voice bot and other RPA are driving productivity by an order, according to some estimates. Mix this cocktail with regtech, you may be on to a killer bot.
Idea 9: Surf on the waves of IoT data
IoT edge devices, in factory, at home, on the road are generating waves of data. There are many more problems that IT can look into to design solutions. From Automation to AI, there are things waiting to happen here. Have your strategy for developing services or solutions in this space.
Idea 10: From MVP to adoption – make it so – for innovation
Many hackathons gets initiated with enthusiasm to build MVP solution. Many of them don't see the light at the end of the day. Now, from MVP to solution, active debates and convergence need to happen in making an “Yes” in innovation to nudge business into action, showing them revenue, reduced cost or innovation adoption.
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