There is likely to be a sea change in the way IT professionals carry out their tasks. Their workloads are set to go up as IT functions are set to go through a period of radical transformation over the next five years.
“Despite the fact that technology will relieve them of a lot of the routine administrative work that they do today by ensuring less work on re-coding, re-doing, and re-architecting, their workloads are set to significantly increase,” according to a survey conducted by IT solutions company Pegasystems.
“In the next three to five years, the IT function will look, feel, and perform very differently to today,” Don Schuerman, Chief Technology Officer of Pegasystems, said.
About 67 per cent of the respondents felt that their work loads are set to go up in the next few years.
The global study surveyed IT leaders from 10 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific on how IT will evolve over the next five years. IT workers will evolve from ‘doers’ to more strategic thinkers, with more than a third of survey respondents indicating that people skills will be increasingly important to them moving forward.
“About 38 per cent of respondents said that as collaborative, empowering technologies give them the freedom to expand their roles and responsibilities, leadership skills will be critical to them,” the survey said.
Low confidence
The study found that IT leaders’ confidence in their own departments is on shaky ground. More than half of all global senior IT decision makers (51 per cent) are uncertain if their IT teams can enact positive change over the next five years — with one in 10 (17 per cent) having either no confidence or trust at all, or holding significant doubts.
Wrong solutions
These worries are compounded by poor technology choices. About two-thirds (58 per cent) of respondents admitted they have wasted between $1 million and $10 million over the last five years on the wrong IT solutions. The good news, however, is that systems will evolve and allow better decision-making, wiser investments, and greater cross-departmental collaboration.
Decentralisation
The study found that digital transformation has allowed 68 per cent of IT leaders to disperse responsibility to other functions and 54 per cent to decentralise it by delegating work to others. “Wiser investments in technologies such as low-code platforms and intelligent automation will make it far easier for people across the business to do tasks that would previously have fallen to IT,” it said.
It will be the end of IT managers who spend their entire career specialising in one technology area, as they will increasingly be expected to fill the role of IT generalists.