IT Is Changing — This is How Your Business Can Adapt
By: Emma White
Tags: Strategy, Business Strategy, Business, It, Adaptability

IT Is Changing — This is How Your Business Can Adapt

From simple changes to major innovations, here are several targets for your IT roadmap in 2021.

Image by iStock

Quick. Think about what your IT department was doing 10 years ago. Chances are they were knee-deep in learning virtual machines, Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Windows Server 2010. Now think about what that same department was doing 5 years ago. Most likely it was learning how to best use the cloud as a platform for the company.

What about 2 years? Docker. Or 1 year? Kubernetes.

And what about now? Edge computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are probably at the top of the list.

As that small experiment shows, technology moves at incredible speeds. What’s hot right now won’t be in a year or two. Or, what about that new technology you’ve deployed, the one you hired the outsource development team to integrate into your business? At the moment it might be performing to perfection. But what will come of it in six months or a year? Maybe one or more puzzle pieces to that complex deployment chain will no longer be around and everything comes to a grinding halt.

The landscape of IT is in a constant state of flux, which is only going to get worse as more and more new startups combine what we already have and make something completely new that will change the way your business runs. It’s inevitable and it’s unstoppable.

But what can your business do to ensure that you are agile enough to adapt to the constant ebb and flow of change?

Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities.

Use open-source technology

This should be the obvious answer to most in the IT industry. But on the off-chance you’re not hip to how open-source has changed enterprise IT, let me explain.

Enterprise businesses thrive on open-source software. In fact, if it weren’t for it, most large-scale companies wouldn’t be able to manage supply chains and the demand of an ever-growing consumer base.

With open-source software as the foundational technology, you gain a number of benefits. First off, it’s far easier to implement. Since you’re not dealing with proprietary code, you have the ability to pull back the curtain to see exactly how the software functions, from high to low level. There is zero mystery. Because of this, your internal or outsourced development teams can easily plug components into your existing infrastructure at will.

That makes it far easier to adapt. Say, for instance, your backend uses Software X to link Process A to Process B. At some point, development on Software X might end leaving you without security and other updates. Because all of the connecting software is still updating, that portion of the chain is going to break.

If Software X is open source, it would be easy to find a replacement or even fork the software on your own. Since you’re not constrained to proprietary licenses, you’re good to go.

Make sure you’re developing with popular languages

Sure, it’s easy to hang on to the languages you’ve used over the decades. After all, your engineers know those languages inside and out and have mastered the task of keeping things running. You might even have a developer or two using COBOL.

Thing is, if you really want to be able to keep up with the times, you’ve got to start integrating more modern languages into the mix. You’ll need languages like Rust, Scala, Golang, Kotlin, Swift, and TypeScript in order to remain agile.

And once you get those languages into the mix, understand things may change and one or more of those languages may fall out of fashion. That’s why you need to make sure you still employ developers for languages like JavaScript, Python, C#, C, and C++. Many of those languages serve as the glue that binds everything together. So even when you integrate one of the “new and fresh” languages, you’ll still be able to keep everything running smoothly (especially with open source under the hood).

Don’t be a late adopter

There are five types of adopters:

Innovators — those who create new technology.

Early adopters — those who adopt new technology first.

Early majority — those who wait until the adoption of the new tech picks up steam.

Late majority — those who wait until the majority has already adopted.

Laggards — those who hold out until they are forced to adopt.

Clearly, in order to be adaptive, you can’t be a member of the bottom two categories. If you really want your company to stay at the forefront of technology, and be able to more easily pivot, you should probably exist with the realm of the early majority. Why? The biggest reason is that early adopters will be the ones who get hit by issues found in new technologies. By holding off until the innovators create and the early adopters experiment, you’ll know better what you’re getting into (and how to deal with issues) based on the experience of those who’ve gone ahead of you.

If you exist within the late majority or the laggards, you might find yourself adopting a technology that is not only no longer new but is already out of touch with what’s happening at the forefront of design and development.

The one benefit of holding out on adopting new technologies is that, by the time you implement the technology, all of the kinks have probably been worked out. Is that tradeoff worth the risk of falling behind?

Inter-departmental collaboration

For the longest time, software engineers didn’t collaborate with anyone outside of their own rank and file. Or, best-case scenario, they’d be willing to play well with IT. That won’t work in an agile ecosystem. Your developers need to be open to inter-departmental collaboration.

End-users need to work with IT. IT needs to work with HR. HR needs to work with management. Management needs to work with upper management. Upper management needs to work with end-users. It’s a circle that, when completed, makes for an incredibly powerful, efficient, and agile business.

When everyone is speaking the same language, has the same goals, and believes in the same vision, a business can be incredibly adaptable.

Conclusion

In order to really make this work for you, put all of these ideas together, and implement them into your workflow and development operations. You’ll be surprised at how these simple changes can positively affect your business’ ability to shift, pivot, and adapt.