What disruptive trends will have the greatest impact on IT in 2013?
Another year, another set of challenges. What disruptive trends will have the greatest impact on IT for companies in 2013?
Answers
I agree that cloud and by inference SaaS is making a bigh difference in computing models, especially of small and mid-sized companies. This should become increasingly the case as providers add to their capabilities and more established providers enter this space.
I think that IT security will become a huge issue in the coming year, going beyond securing databases and extending to securing the applications themselves. Recent headlines about Chinese hacking are the tip of the iceberg. But they are raising the concious level of senior executives. And whether its foreign countries, industrial espionage, terrorists, or just plain bad guys, hacking is likely to become an ever larger story. Manufaturers are likely to have to deal with someone hacking into the process controls that run their factory equipment. Warehouses will worry about ASRS systems. Etc.
The move to cloud and SaaS will only increase this challenge as presumably instead of having to hack the systems of individual companies, someone could now hack into the SaaS system used by many companies. Of course the offset to this challenge is that in general providers of cloud services can afford to have better security than an individual company might.
But I expect the issue if IT security to get lots of press and impact the IT strategies and spend on many companies and agencies.
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Disruption in 2013 will continue to come from enabling technologies like cloud computing. This has fundamentally changed how IT is organized, bringing in democratization and decentralization of the IT function. Easier, cloud-based development tools mean that at the departmental level, there can be more experimentation with proof-of-concept prototypes and development; and the lower cap-ex and infrastructure cost of the cloud will allow for greater use of sophisticated tools throughout all levels of the enterprise. This will bring greater flexibility and innovation to the enterprise, but at the same time, it will bring a management challenge.
This management challenge may cause some disintermediation of the IT back office, not only from within as departmental managers embrace these new tools, but also as more outside service providers step in to fill specific needs.
These disruptive impacts will be positive for businesses. Broader access to business/computing platforms, and commoditization of IT brings an end to the relative isolation of IT - and this dramatic shift will bridge the gap between IT and the rest of business. In the past, IT drove all business decisions because the tools couldn't be understood by the rest of the enterprise, and there were inherent technological and financial limitations. That gap is continuing to bridge as ownership of IT moves further into the business.
Maureen Barry
Chief Marketing Officer, WGroup
http://thinkwgroup.com/
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