Technical professionals find architecture decisions to be increasingly difficult. A widening skills gap exacerbates the problem and can impede digital business transformation. To help address this challenge, we summarize the top trends and planning considerations across 10 key technology areas.
Overview
Opportunities and Challenges
- A business opportunity: New digital businesses emerge every day, from asset-intensive industries, to healthcare, to government and beyond. There has never been a better time for organizations to quicken their digital transformation.
- A skills challenge: The pace of technological change will continue to accelerate, forcing organizations to invest in acquiring the skills necessary for digital transformation. Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, DevOps, security and many other technologies impact every IT role.
- A technology challenge: Organizations will increasingly adopt cloud and edge computing technologies, adding to the complexity of application modernization, data governance, security and identity administration, content management, and business intelligence initiatives.
Gartner recommends technical professionals should do the following:
- Technical professionals must focus on quickly understanding, integrating and operationalizing new technologies. Acquiring the right set of skills to undergo digital transformation is imperative.
- While the pace of technological change is accelerating, the demand to deliver solutions more quickly is also increasing. To succeed, technical professionals must focus on increasing agility across the IT organization.
- Technologies such as cloud, analytics, security and AI are not disparate and independent entities. Each is necessary — and dependent on the others — for digital transformation. All IT roles must understand how these technologies impact their discipline.
- Hybrid environments — comprising data centers, public cloud and edge computing — have become the “new normal” for mainstream enterprises of all sizes. This paradigm requires new platforms, tools and practices to address new needs.
