“Change is the one constant,” says Hericlitus, and my years of experience in the technology industry have underscored that reality. We find ourselves once again in a period of fundamental change, this time driven by the XaaS/Cloud revolution, which is even more fundamental than the mainframe to modern distributed systems of the 1990s.
The challenges that business leaders face today are skyrocketing technology budgets, talent shortages, mounting technical debt, and uncertain business results. For the past 20 years, digital transformation has meant applying technological advances to every aspect of the business except for the technology department itself. As odd as it may sound, however, it is time for CEOs to bring digital transformation to their technology department.
Technical novelty is not what is required for digital transformation of industry; it's the adoption of existing technology to digitally enable businesses that is lacking.
Despite popular belief, we are still at just the beginning of the digital transformation era, one that will require an almost complete transformation of the technology workforce as a result of the availability of and move to XaaS/Cloud services.
Digital transformation of industries will continue, and while some are further along than others, (e.g. financial services, healthcare), the pace of change in technology will always outpace the rate of business adoption. Its advance—technical novelty, as it were—will not lead to digital transformation of any industry; the adoption of existing technology to digitally enable businesses will. Create all the technological advances you’d like, but until businesses adopt them fully, they’re useless.
If I asked IT departments about the internet in the mid 1990's, they would have most likely warned against it. If I asked server engineers in the mid 2000’s about virtualization, they would say I shouldn’t trust it for mission critical applications. If I asked most CIO’s about Amazon cloud in 2012, they would have warned me about the risks of lack of control. If I ask many current CTO’s about leveraging PaaS options instead of custom code, I would hear that it doesn’t meet our unique requirements and lacks the “flexibility” of a custom solution.
Shocked as you may be by my youthful appearance, I’ve been asking these questions for three decades. What I’ve learned is that many technology decisions are based on the options that exist within the capabilities of the current technology workforce, not the solutions that have already emerged that could be leveraged and cause disruption. Once the technology teams are in place, natural bias and resistance to change emerges, and advancement actually becomes a threat.
20+ years ago, talk of technology as a utility abounded, and we are now living in that prophesied reality. Forrester and Gartner are both predicting that 70-80% of all code will be built with APaaS solutions (Application as a Service—APaaS, or so called ‘Low/No Code’) during this decade, and we are already moving in that direction. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will no doubt own the space in the future, and the technology workforce will look entirely different than it does today.
Business leaders, this means that software development, IT, and other technology teams must be rethought from the ground up. While digital business transformation is enabled by technology adoption that changes the way products and services are marketed, sold, delivered, and supported, don't forget your technology workforce will also need to be disrupted to an even greater extent. because of the advances in technology now underway.
This is a net positive and will allow for more resources to drive innovation, data insight, information security, new customer acquisition, and existing customer service, with the excess fueling the bottom line. It’s only fair that, after decades of those of us in the technology industry disrupting everyone else's jobs, we take a healthy dose of our own digital transformation medicine.