Stay Ahead of the IT Curve: How IT will Disrupt in 2016

The largest hotel company in the world owns no physical rooms. The largest passenger service in the world does not own a single car. Unlike the technology that has created a plethora of products and functions for consumers and businesses, Airbnb and Uber are bringing technological disruption to delivery models. And in 2016, the information technology sphere will continue to accelerate a trend developed over the last several years. The IT offerings that businesses purchase will not change, however; how those products and services are purchased will be considerably different.

The consumption of IT services is moving away from the traditional mechanism of long-implementation cycles including: design, purchase and installation of operating systems, systems management software, server costs, and maintenance. This approach embeds technologies in a slow, complex and expensive manner. Replacing it is a skillful and agile system for IT that provides services, storage and infrastructure on demand.This delivery system offers scalability, allowing IT divisions to purchase based on need. This is a fundamental shift that places corporate IT departments as consumers of IT, thereby allowing greater synergies inside organizations and placing the IT department as a deliverer of value to the business as opposed to a cost center. Now, IT’s role is not just service delivery, but a means to add value by managing risk more effectively, and bringing faster speed to market for products and services.Fundamental to this transformation is the utilization of cloud-based technologies as the delivery solution for IT services, storage and infrastructure. Services such as Microsoft Azure, Dropbox (NewsAlert) and Verismic’s Syxsense are the next phase of an evolving IT infrastructure focused on virtualization and automation.

There is tremendous growth in these cloud platforms, with compound annual growth rates exceeding 15 percent. And rates are expected to continue climbing in the coming decade as demand increases for innovative solutions to the surge and complexity of data driven applications, resource utilization, and management and monitoring environments.

IT is aligning with the long-run economic concept of specialization of labor and its development and enhancement of core competencies, as a means to exert a comparative and competitive advantage in the marketplace.For the IT department looking to integrate further into a corporate ecosystem, this means focusing on areas of expertise. If your IT department is adept at infrastructure, then pursue that business and shed unprofitable lines that can be outsourced. The goal should be to hold a core of differentiated assets, which can drive high-value competitive inertia and greater cost efficiency.

This task can be difficult, particularly if there are antiquated and rigid IT processes embedded in an organization, or a lack of IT maturity. To mitigate these challenges, the push for IT departments should be to create greater integration by compressing IT silos together, accelerate virtualization and automation, and expand IT self-service options.

Read the full article at tmcnet.com.