Demise of the traditional IT department
Information technology (IT) has been a dominating influence in many large manufacturing and process automation companies dating back to the 1970s, the age of mainframes in control rooms. Many of today’s IT departments are legacies of the old mainframe days when IT was the domain of specialists. They became large and powerful and usually grabbed control of most of the computers installed in the factory and on the plant floor.
Change is here. Computer expertise is no longer just the domain of a select few. During the workday, everyone wants to use the same technology devices they are familiar with on a personal level. The old command and control rules don’t apply in the new ‘bring your own device’ world.
Most IT managers feel that they are continuing to lose control of their usual bread-and-butter business. According to several IT services researchers, there is a continuing battle for the soul of IT and the beginning of the end of the traditional IT manager role.
Many managers across all departments now believe that they can make better and faster decisions without involving IT. Already, more than a third of all technology spending now happens without any IT department involvement.
And 90% of companies say they now have non-IT business departments that are partially or wholly responsible for technology decisions.
In the security arena, the fortress mentality in which all IT was architected for security to be fool proof is giving way to systems that respond to multiple threats when and where they happen. As a result, the role of people in data security will decline, replaced by distributed capabilities that detect, assess and respond rapidly and effectively.
Today, business process design is driven by the need for optimisation and cost reduction. Tomorrow, it will be driven by the need to create superior user experiences that help to boost customer satisfaction. And that’s the name of the game.
Age of big data
The term ‘Big Data’ was coined in 2008 and caught on quickly as a blanket term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications.
Big data is being generated by everything around us at all times. Every digital process and social media exchange produces it. Systems, sensors and mobile devices transmit it. Big data arrives from multiple sources at high speed, huge volume and variety. To extract meaningful value from big data requires optimal processing power, analytics capabilities and skills.
Analysing big data is becoming a key competitive advantage, generating waves of productivity growth, innovation and consumer surplus. Every business will have to grapple with the implications. The increasing amount and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia and social media and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth.
McKinsey Research reports that Big Data is now an important factor of production, along with labour and capital. By 2009, every company with more than 1000 employees, in nearly all sectors in the US economy, already had an average of 200 terabytes of stored data per company.
There are five broad ways in which using big data can create value:
* Unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much higher speed.
* As organisations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything, to expose variability and boost performance.
* Big data allows ever-narrower segmentation of customers and much more precisely tailored products and services.
* Big data analytics can substantially improve decision-making.
* Big data can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services.
The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth. Every company needs to take big data seriously. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from wide ranging, deep and real-time information. Several issues will have to be addressed to capture the full potential of big data. Policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability will need to be addressed in a big data world. Organisations need not only to put the right talent and technology in place but also structure workflows and incentives to optimise the use of big data.
Jim Pinto is a technology futurist, international speaker and automation industry commentator. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com.
Or review his prognostications and predictions on his website www.jimpinto.com
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