With businesses looking forward to go more digital in the near future, almost every IT department of companies across different verticals are finding it increasingly difficult to get the right skill set to address the situation.
Gartner defines digital business as new business designs that blend the virtual world and the physical worlds, changing how processes and industries work through the Internet of Things.
“This year enterprises will spend over $40 billion designing, implementing and operating the Internet of Things,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014 in Goa. “Every piece of equipment, anything of value, will have embedded sensors. This means leading asset-intensive enterprises will have over half a million IP addressable objects in 2020.”
The digital business will be mainly dominant in industries like BFSI, telecom, media and entertainment. Individual business units within a company like HR, marketing, sales, etc are bypassing the CIO to take lead in driving individual digital initiatives.
Digital businesses will impact jobs in different ways. By 2018, digital businesses will require 50 per cent fewer business process workers. However, by 2018 digital business will drive a 500 percent boost in digital jobs.
Right now, the hottest IT skills are focused on – Mobile, User Experience and Data sciences. In the future, three years from now, the hottest skills will be:
Smart Machines (including the Internet of Things)
Robotics
Automated Judgment
Ethics
Over the next seven years, there will be a surge in new specialized jobs. The top jobs for digital will be:
Integration Specialists
Digital Business Architects
Regulatory Analysts
Risk Professionals
Gartner estimates that 50 percent of all technology sales people are actively selling direct to business units, not IT departments. CIOs in a situation like this, need to integrate the individual business units and drive overall agility.
“It is more about participation than controlling. The IT department simply have to stop thinking about shadow IT and empower the internal as well as external IT customers,” said Partha Iyengar, distinguished analyst and Gartner India head of research.
Gartner also indicated the rise of bimodal IT department. Bimodal IT fills the digital divide between what IT provides and what the enterprise really needs. Mode 1 is traditional, and the systems that support them must be reliable, predictable, and safe. Mode 2 is non-sequential, emphasizing agility and speed.