The quiet revolution that fundamentally changes how we create and use IT
The IT world is changing more than ever before. The amount and speed of change is such that we, as individuals and specific corporate teams, can hardly absorb it. We are seeing a confluence of many technological innovations that will revolutionize the way we create and use IT. The revolution is subtle, and no single technology will make a fundamental change, but their combination is moving us into a whole new era - one where existing IT practices and processes will be completely inadequate.
The great democratization
Most of the visible trends involve extending IT far beyond the boundaries of the communities and uses where we’ve become used to seeing it. At Trask, I’ve seen our role changing ever more from a supplier to a consultant in recent months. Instead of delivering solutions, clients ask us to co-create their business. We are involved not only in solving problems, but also in their formulation. Increasingly often, we are involved in creating assignments and working out together what will be best for the client's future. Business and IT are coming together to create agile teams.
The same movement is happening in reverse. External and internal IT are moving from creation to support. They no longer have a monopoly on inventing technology. Many other departments, colleagues and entities are now involved - partners, external suppliers, people from completely different departments. Low-code and no-code approaches, but above all a change in the way we think about IT, help this process.
So instead of apps, we are gradually starting to create platforms. Toolkits that the user can use on their own. Whereas an app directly told them what to do, the platform more democratically allows them to choose their own solution.
The ecosystem era
By 2025, 95% of new digital initiatives will be built on cloud platforms. The cloud is as fundamental a revolution, albeit more subtle, as the current machine learning boom. And it's definitely not just about running our applications in cloud instances or containers.
Evolution is moving from internal APIs to external APIs, from best-of-breed solutions to ecosystems. Fundamental to the future architecture of our IT systems is the combination of a cloud-native approach, SaaS solutions and the use of third-party APIs. The next wave awaits us, where we will go from developing solutions on our own (very common in agile teams) back to using ready-made solutions - but in a different way, from smaller pieces pre-integrated with each other and prepared in a serverless infrastructure. The difference between in-house development and using ready-made services will be so dramatic that building from components will clearly dominate the future development. And it's through the pre-integration of services and components with each other that we will increasingly move towards choosing things that are compatible with the ecosystem we have selected.
The cloud will decide which solution we use. But not to worry, the ecosystems will be really robust and open to many vendors.
Don't react. Get ahead of the curve
The faster things change, the faster we need to think today, to know the current situation as accurately as possible, which is why we need to adopt an event-based mindset. IT is moving from the role of data manager to that of a nervous system that responds to ever more events. When creating solutions, we will no longer base them on the present state of data, but on events that are currently happening. These will be the key to our future actions.
Changes are coming. The time of quantum computers, of widely available training data rented for money, of simulation platforms, of data markets, of AI orchestration platforms, of low code and no code, is coming. None of us knows the future precisely. But what we do know is that we have to change and make our approach more flexible and based on what is happening. Not on what we internally consider as a given.
A sci-fi era when even butterflies can follow you
The sexiest thing about articles about the future is forecasting trends. What are the big things we can expect in the next few years? We won’t deprive you of them. So, what should you focus on?
The future is not the Metaverse, whose hype has increased even further since last year. But we all realise that its time is still far away, and it won't be much good for a while yet. Although Mark Zuckerberg strives to convince us otherwise, the future of work meetings really isn't in avatars.
The big thing is tiny IT. Miniaturisation. We already have sensors that you can mount on a butterfly, sensors without a battery, sensors that take energy from the surrounding Wi-Fi background. Soon we'll have a giant sensor network around us. It will be cheap and easy to read - the sensors can be printed on paper or fabric. They will provide us with a much better overview of our surroundings and environment. We're going to collect vast amounts of data. Optimists and pessimists have different opinions as to how we will work with such data.
The time of quantum computers is coming. Their development is moving forward extremely fast. Every year the number of usable qubits doubles or triples and we can work with them in a cloud. We can buy quantum computer calculations with a credit card. This, of course, brings the issue of security into play. A calculation that used to take thousands of years is now possible in hours. Quantum computers will soon be able to crack the data we need to hold, such as passport data, crypto keys, digital signatures and medical records.
And the icing on the cake is digital people. As early as 1638, René Descartes contemplated a time when it would be difficult to distinguish between the living and the machine. That time is now. We can hardly distinguish between a living human and an AI-connected chatbot anymore. Artificially created images win photography competitions, we can synthetically create the human voice, and soon we'll be making new movies with long-dead actors. A whole economy is developing around digital people.
The future does not come gradually, but in leaps. We are living through one of them right now. And only the brave and well-prepared can take advantage of such a leap. At Trask, we follow trends and are happy to discuss how to keep your business at the front of the peloton. E-mail us at jantos@thetrask.com
