Why your IT team must adapt now to the workplace of tomorrow

During the course of the last decade, our collective expectations of how we consume goods and services and how we work were fundamentally transformed. At the heart of this transformation were huge strides in the development of mobile devices, connectivity and cloud computing. The pace of change has felt fast. As we moved into 2020, the potential was already there to make the preceding 10 years seem like a warm-up for the main act. 5G was due to roll out, the Internet of Things finally took off, and the combination of these with AI and the untethered scalability of the cloud would have affected society profoundly.

And then Covid-19 happened. The majority of nations are still grappling with the health implications of the pandemic to have given serious consideration for what the longer-term societal effects are likely to be. However, we can be confident that enterprise technology and the nature of work will change as a result – more remote-working, fewer workers overall for the next couple of years, a greater use of automation and an even faster pace of digitisation as we move even more of our lives online, are looking like fairly safe bets at the time of writing.

Those responsible for delivering, securing and managing the infrastructure powering the next decade must keep pace with new technology and methodology, and harness these for constant innovation. They must do so in the face of omnipresent cyber security threats and the greater empowerment of employees to ensure they are as productive as they can be. No mean feat.

The challenges facing technology professionals are likely to become even more acute as a result of the changes to our lives that have already occurred and are likely to remain in place for many months and perhaps years. More than anything, Covid-19 has reinforced our original conclusions, making the changes required, and the timeframe in which to adapt, only more pressing.

So how well equipped are the IT professionals of today to tackle the challenges and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead?

What are their experiences and expectations around workloads, budgets, hiring, outsourcing, technology and the nature of work?

To find out more, watch me present the full research findings contained in our report conducted together with Computing magazine.