It’s no secret that the job of an IT professional looks different than it did five or ten years ago. Terms like ‘big data,’ ‘BYOD,’ and ‘the cloud’ are no longer just buzz words; they’re now central to many organizations and have changed the roles of IT professionals.
Some have suggested that the IT department will become obsolete as these new technologies converge with other organizational functions like sales and marketing, and shift away from in-house systems toward the increasingly popular EaaS (everything as a service). In my opinion, the idea that IT is going away is ridiculous.
Although there is much truth to the idea of functional convergence as technology rapidly changes (How many articles have you seen this week that have examined who owns big data—CMO or CIO?), this only increases the importance and dependence on those executives within an organization that craft strategic direction around information systems: The infamous senior IT decision makers. These systems continue to shift from a supporting role to a primary part of organizations’ strategies.
The Hackett Group recently conducted research which revealed two key components to world-class IT organizations: a focus on automation and complexity reduction. John Reeves, Global IT Advisory Practice Leader for The Hackett Group, stated, “The performance of world-class IT organizations demonstrates that it truly is possible to ‘do more with less,’ minimize cost, and deliver higher qualities of service.” According to this research, these world-class organizations meet ROI expectations twice as often as what is typical.
This is part of the reason senior IT professionals have reacted so positively to Seagate’s recent launch of the Kinetic Open Storage Platform. Rocky Pimental, Seagate’s CMO put it perfectly when he said, “…our internal R&D teams have designed [a] unique, first-of-its-kind storage architecture to enable cheaper, more scalable object storage solutions that free up IT professionals from having to invest in hardware and software they don’t need— while empowering them with the most innovative storage technology available.”
At Seagate, we’re taking partners with IT professionals. IT is changing, but it’s definitely not going away. Those organizations that come out ahead are those that recognize the shifts in the business landscape, and adopt a mindset that supports both automation and complexity reduction.
[Read more about Kinetic here]
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